The new East India Company won't arrive by Sea

Last year, I attended a meeting where entrepreneurs were engaged in a debate that resembled an engineering discussion. They were trying to select the blockchain to build on, which cloud provider offered the greatest reliability, who should hold custody of tokenised assets, and which compliance platform could verify users across multiple jurisdictions.

The conversation moved from technical specifications and commercial costs to an unrelated question: “What happens if one of those providers is no longer available?” Until that moment, everyone had focused on technology. Suddenly, the topic shifted to sovereignty. That conversation replicates the discussion happening in Pakistan today.

Our national debate has centered on cryptocurrency: Should it be regulated? Should exchanges be licensed? Can Pakistan become a regional hub for digital assets? These are important questions, but perhaps not the first ones we should ask.

Pakistan received $41.6 billion in workers’ remittances in FY26, and today, nearly 9 out of 10 retail payment transactions are digital. Quietly, almost without public debate, one of the country’s most vital economic systems is becoming software based. Therefore, a more pressing question is this: Who will own the infrastructure that underpins it? Financial systems rely on cloud computing, digital identity, custody platforms, compliance software, payment channels, and blockchain systems that operate across multiple jurisdictions. We debate who should regulate digital assets but spend little time discussing who governs the infrastructure through which those assets move.

These questions are being asked globally. The United States has made semiconductor resilience a national priority, Europe is investing in cloud sovereignty, and countries across Asia are building domestic artificial intelligence capabilities while remaining connected to global technology markets.

The countries that will shape the next generation of finance are likely to be those that build institutions investors can trust, regulators can understand, and enterprises can rely on.

This conversation is about resilience, not isolation. Pakistan cannot build every layer of up-to-date financial infrastructure on its own, nor should it. The global economy depends on interoperability, and foreign investment, international technology, and transnational financial networks are essential for growth.

However, interoperability is not the same as dependency. If our financial data is entirely outside our jurisdiction, what happens during a geopolitical dispute? If tokenised national assets rely on foreign custodians, whose laws ultimately govern them? If critical payment infrastructure depends on a single commercial provider, how quickly can those services be replaced? These questions are no longer hypothetical; they are becoming critical issues of economic policy.

History offers useful lessons. The East India Company did not arrive in South Asia as an empire; it began as a trading company. Its influence did not stem from military power but from commerce. Over time, commercial dependence became a means of political leverage. Today’s technology companies are not colonial powers, and the analogy should not be overstressed, but history does provide one enduring lesson: when critical infrastructure lies beyond a nation’s control, one’s strategic options narrow.

This lesson applies equally to software as it once did to shipping lanes. Pakistan has already recognised the importance of sovereign financial infrastructure. The State Bank of Pakistan has spent years modernising domestic payment systems because secure settlements matter as much as the payments themselves. This tactical thinking now needs to extend to cloud architecture, digital custody, tokenised assets, and cross-border settlements.

The countries that will shape the next generation of finance are likely to be those that build institutions investors can trust, regulators can understand, and enterprises can rely on. These countries will entice global capital while guaranteeing that critical financial data, regulatory monitoring, and operational dependability cannot be compromised by the failure or withdrawal of any single provider.

Perhaps we need a new phrase to describe that balance: not technological nationalism, not digital isolation, but “sovereign interoperability”. This refers to the ability to participate fully in global markets without becoming structurally dependent on any single cloud provider, blockchain network, custody platform, or jurisdiction.

Pakistan is not choosing among openness, independence, and sovereignty; it is deciding how to achieve all three. Every generation inherits different forms of strategic infrastructure. Once it was ports, then railways, then oil. Today, it increasingly consists of software. The countries that prosper may not be those that build every technology themselves, but rather those that never lose the ability to make choices.

The article does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Business Recorder or its owners.