Accept Payments in Bangladesh and Pakistan: Mobile Money First

Bangladesh and Pakistan are two of South Asia's largest consumer markets, and they share a defining trait: payments run on mobile money and instant bank rails, not cards. A merchant who arrives with a card-only checkout will reach only a thin slice of buyers. This guide explains the methods that matter in each country and how to accept them.

Bangladesh: a mobile financial services economy

Bangladesh's digital payments are dominated by mobile financial services (MFS) — wallet-style accounts tied to a phone number, topped up and cashed out through vast agent networks. The scale is large: total MFS accounts reached about 239 million in early 2025, with monthly transaction value around Tk 1.72 trillion and growing more than 30% year on year.

Two providers lead:

• bKash is the market leader, with more than 83 million registered customers and a nationwide agent network in the hundreds of thousands. For most Bangladeshi shoppers, bKash is digital payment.
• Nagad, originally launched with the postal service, has grown rapidly and reports around 90 million registered customers, helped by its role distributing government payments.

For a merchant, accepting bKash and Nagad is the equivalent of accepting cards in a card-led market — it is the baseline. Checkout typically works by the customer authorizing a payment from their wallet via a payment menu or a redirect, with confirmation returned to you in real time.

A 2026 development worth noting: Bangladesh Bank opened up interoperability through the National Payment Switch, allowing bank-to-wallet and wallet-to-wallet transfers from late 2025, and is working toward a fuller instant-payment platform. Over time this should make reconciliation and payouts smoother across providers.

Pakistan: Raast changes the game

Pakistan's story in 2026 is the rise of Raast, the central bank's instant payment system. Raast processed roughly 1.28 billion transactions worth about PKR 29.6 trillion in fiscal year 2025 and crossed PKR 50 trillion cumulatively by early 2026. Around 45 million Raast IDs had been registered by mid-2025, and a fast-growing merchant network supports person-to-merchant QR payments.

Raast matters to merchants for the same reasons Pix matters in Brazil: it is instant, low-cost, and increasingly the default for digitally active consumers. Digital channels now account for the large majority of retail payments in Pakistan.

Alongside Raast, two mobile wallets carry significant consumer volume:

• JazzCash, with on the order of 20 million monthly active users.
• Easypaisa, in a similar range.

Both serve large unbanked and rural populations through agent networks, much like Bangladesh's MFS providers.

Cash on delivery still exists — design for it

In both markets, a meaningful share of e-commerce historically settled as cash on delivery (COD). The direction of travel is clearly toward prepaid digital payment, accelerated by Raast and MFS, but depending on your category you may still need to support or manage COD — and to use prepaid digital incentives to shift buyers away from it, since COD carries higher failure and return costs.

What this means for your checkout

The common thread across Bangladesh and Pakistan is that the wallet and the instant rail are the checkout — cards are secondary. Practically:

1. Lead with bKash and Nagad for Bangladesh; lead with Raast and the major wallets (JazzCash, Easypaisa) for Pakistan.
2. Confirm payments in real time and release orders on confirmation.
3. Support local currency pricing (taka, rupee) and local-language presentation.
4. Have a deliberate COD strategy rather than treating it as a default.

Accepting it without two separate builds

Both markets involve provider-specific integrations — bKash and Nagad in Bangladesh, Raast and wallet rails in Pakistan — each with its own flows and settlement. Maintaining them directly is a real engineering burden for a merchant whose core business is not payments.

This is the case for connecting through an orchestration layer. A platform like PiqPay exposes regional methods such as bKash, Nagad and JazzCash through one integration and one dashboard, so adding Bangladesh or Pakistan looks the same to your team as adding any other market, and reconciliation is unified across providers.

Practical checklist

• Treat mobile wallets and instant rails as primary, cards as secondary.
• For Bangladesh: bKash + Nagad at minimum.
• For Pakistan: Raast + JazzCash/Easypaisa.
• Confirm in real time; reconcile by provider reference.
• Localize currency and language; plan your COD handling explicitly.

Get the wallet-and-rail layer right and these large, fast-digitizing markets open up to you.

Want bKash, Nagad and Raast-era methods through one integration? Talk to PiqPay.