SBP issues revised regulations for EMIs

The State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) on Wednesday issued revised regulations for electronic money institutions (EMIs) for enhancing outreach and scope of the innovative fintech-enabled payment companies. The updated regulations now allow EMIs to offer their customers, including minors and freelancers, increased monthly wallet limits along with offering new payment services such as Payments Aggregation, Bill/Invoice Aggregation, Payment Initiation, Account Information, Escrow Services for domestic e-commerce transactions, Services via APIs to financial institutions (FIs), Fintechs and Third-Party Service Provider (TPSPs) and Inward cross border remittances to their customers, said a statement issued here. There has been increasing interest by local and foreign fintech companies to work as an EMI in Pakistan since the issuance of earlier EMI Regulations in 2019 and the central bank has given approval to four EMIs to launch commercial operation to date while six EMIs were at different licensing stages. As of March 2023, these EMIs have opened close to 1.6 million e-money wallets with a total outstanding e-money of Rs. 2 billion, the SBP spokesperson informed adding that the revised regulations were in line with SBPs vision of encouraging non-banking fintech companies entry into the payments space to promote digitisation in the financial sector and accelerate level of outreach of EMI operations for achieving the objective of boosting adoption of digital financial services.