Payment gateway integration in Pakistan: wallets, cards and Raast QR compared (2026)

To accept payments in Pakistan you have four routes: a wallet gateway such as JazzCash or Easypaisa, a licensed card gateway, Raast QR through your bank, or manual methods such as bank transfer and cash on delivery. Most businesses combine two. The merchant account and its onboarding usually take longer than the code, so apply early, and make sure your system records each payment method separately.

Four ways to take payments

No route is "best". The right one depends on where your customers pay (online, at the counter or at the door) and how much you can reconcile by hand.

What integration involves

Whichever provider you choose, the steps look much the same:

1. 1Apply for a merchant account. Easypaisa says any business with a live website or app can apply through its merchant registration portal, and that its integration team then provides an integration guide. We could not find a public JazzCash API reference, so expect to get its documents during onboarding too.
2. 2Get sandbox credentials and build against the test environment.
3. 3Choose how checkout works. Most businesses start with a hosted checkout, where the customer pays on the provider's page, because it keeps card and wallet details off your system.
4. 4Handle the confirmation on your server. The provider tells your server the payment succeeded. Do not trust the customer's browser coming back to your site as proof, because it can be faked or never arrive.
5. 5Check the signature the provider sends with each confirmation, and make your handler safe to run twice, so a repeated message does not mark two orders paid.
6. 6Reconcile and refund. Match each settlement to your orders. Ask the provider what refunds your merchant tier allows, because some only support full refunds or handle them in the merchant portal.

Fees, settlement times and refund rules are in your merchant agreement, not in the code, so ask for them in writing before you build.

Where Raast QR fits

Raast is the State Bank's instant payment system. Dawn reported in September 2025 over 770,000 Raast merchants, mostly using QR codes, but person-to-merchant volume was far below person-to-person: about 1.5 million transactions worth Rs4.5 billion from January to March, less than one day of person-to-person payments, which averaged 4.1 million a day. Dawn gave reasons merchants held back, including merchant fees and little experience among banks at acquiring merchants.

That is changing through policy. The State Bank has told petrol pumps to make Raast QR fully operational by 31 January 2027, which we covered in our news report on Raast QR at petrol pumps. For a shop, Raast QR is the simplest way to start: ask your bank which codes it supports and what it charges.

Check the provider before you sign

• Is it licensed? Some gateways describe themselves as State Bank licensed. Ask for the licence and check it, rather than relying on a sales page.
• Who holds the money? Ask how long funds sit with the provider and when they settle to your account.
• What are the fees, including per-transaction charges, refund fees and monthly minimums?
• What does it support? Currency, cards, wallets, recurring payments and refunds all differ.
• Is there a sandbox, and a person you can ask when something fails?

Record each payment method separately

This is the mistake we see in systems of every size. In one of our early restaurant POS builds, the drawer logic matched the word "cash" in a payment method's name, which also matched JazzCash. Wallet money never enters the drawer, so the till expected more cash than it held. Treat cash, card, wallet and QR as separate payment methods from the start, so the drawer reconciles and your month-end shows where the money really came from. The same idea matters in a restaurant POS and in a WhatsApp ordering system that takes payment details.

If your counter must keep working when the internet drops, also read our guide to an offline restaurant POS, because online payments are the part that stops first.

How we can help

We build the payment side of POS systems, web apps and ordering bots: separate payment methods, server-side confirmation, refunds and reconciliation. You open the merchant account with your provider, and we connect it using the provider's sandbox and integration guide. See our custom software solutions, or tell us how your customers pay today and we will say which route we would start with.