Ahson bin Saeed takes charge of Raast Payments Pakistan

In a key leadership development at Pakistan’s digital payments infrastructure, Ahson bin Saeed has assumed the role of Chief Executive Officer of Raast Payments Pakistan (Pvt.) Ltd., a wholly owned subsidiary of State Bank of Pakistan (SBP).

Ahson brings over a decade of leadership and strategic experience in payments, fintech, and digital financial services across Pakistan, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia.

According to information available on Ahson’s LinkedIn profile, he serves as a board member and strategic advisor at Keenu, a digital payment fintech, contributing to licensed EMI operations, SME wallets, merchant services, and B2B e-commerce solutions.

He holds executive roles at TPS Worldwide as General Manager for TPS Arabia and Managing Director, focusing on open banking, embedded finance, digital transformation, and sustainable fintech solutions.

Ahson is also the Co-founder of Fils, a Dubai-based sustainable fintech platform, driving strategy and commercial growth in sustainability, carbon action, and payments innovation in the UAE.

Raast is Pakistan’s first instant payment system that will enable end-to-end digital payments among individuals, businesses and government entities instantaneously.

The state-of-the-art Pakistan’s Faster Payment System will be used to settle small-value retail payments in real time while at the same time providing a cheap and universal access to all players in the financial industry, including commercial banks, microfinance banks, government entities and fintechs (EMIs & PSPs).

Pakistan has low electronic transactions for a number of reasons, including low banking penetration, lack of trust and awareness of digital payment methods, limited interoperability, difficult accessibility and high cost of transactions. The Real Time Gross Settlement System (RTGS) of Pakistan provides instant payment settlements for large-value and corporate transactions only.

Last month, it was reported that the RAAST digital payment platform processed over 3 billion transactions, collectively amounting to nearly Rs80 trillion since its launch.

During a briefing on RAAST’s progress to Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, officials said that the platform has now garnered over 48 million users, with 53 financial institutions from across the country now integrated into the system.