Digital Pakistan: The Way Forward

Digital Pakistan Vision: The current state

Pakistan’s digital journey has garnered a lot of attention in the past few years. Ever since the current government laid the foundation of the Digital Pakistan Vision, there has been a lot of speculation around how and when the promise of a truly digital Pakistan will be fulfilled. While the government is taking the right steps towards going digital, the pace is relatively slow as compared to other countries. Quite a few issues need to be ironed out before the Digital Pakistan Vision is truly realized with its intended purpose.

How to overcome the Digital Pakistan challenges?

While there are challenges that need to be addressed in both policy making and implementation, following are some critical areas that need to be focused on:

1. Digital Infrastructure: Developing a robust and accessible digital infrastructure is as absolute imperative as it will allow individuals and organizations to easily and efficiently operationalize tasks via mobile phones, tablets, and computers. A strong, far-reaching infrastructure will inspire young talent residing in small cities to become digitally enabled, it will increase participation in digital activities and encourage education.

2. Citizen-Centric Approach of the Government: Digital Pakistan Vision will truly emerge once the Government of Pakistan takes a citizen-centric approach and revolves its digital transformation initiatives around provisioning citizen services. While the Pakistan Citizen Portal is a step in the right direction, we need to take it a step further by digitizing all the services at the provincial and federal level. True transformation will come when we build more transparent, workflow-based and customer-oriented services across every public entity. This transformation will create more employment which will consequently create learning and growth opportunities for organizations.

   When the services will be available online, it will open up new avenues of integrations and inter-department connectivity, and generate data which the financial institutions can leverage to facilitate their lending. However, the State Bank of Pakistan needs to make sure that all these EMI licenses are properly used and the licensed companies are dedicating their efforts to solve the most pressing problems associated with FinTech and digital payments.

3. Digital Payments: This is one of the key pillars of the Digital Pakistan Vision. The percentage of population using digital payments regularly offers endless opportunities as they are being utilized in person-to-person, B2B, as well as B2C scenarios. A strong digital payments infrastructure has the potential to even replace cash-on-delivery payment systems. Once cash is replaced, digital economy will evolve, eCommerce will expand, all the service offerings will grow, and this will enable more lending opportunities for the financial sector, which will result in more employment and growth for companies.
4. Entrepreneurial Mindset: While the local talent pool is ripe with skills and aptitude required to develop solutions that can compete on a global level, they fail to understand one critical aspect: how to sell their products. We need to make sure that we have the proper infrastructure and mentoring environment where industry leaders, venture capitalists, and angel investors are coming forth and investing in nurturing the entrepreneurial mindset of these startups to enable them to actually scale. More than financial investment, entrepreneurship, innovation, and incubation are integral parts of the equation.

What is Systems Limited doing to achieve the Digital Pakistan Vision?

As a key player of Pakistan’s IT industry, Systems Limited is in complete support and alignment with the Digital Pakistan Vision and striving to turn this initiative into a resounding success that will have a massive positive impact on our country’s economy. We are investing in FinTech to enable cashless transactions. OneLoad, a digital wallet and payment solution developed by one of our subsidiaries, is a step in that direction. Moreover, we are developing more innovative ideas on how to leverage data to create an ecosystem of smarter lending solutions while using technology to automate different scenarios within this scope. We have also worked on digitization initiatives with different key government authorities such as Land Records Management, Higher Education Commission, Customs, Securities & Exchange Commission of Pakistan, and more. Through our subsidiary Systems Ventures we are also incubating a few startups and nurturing their business acumen so that they can scale and grow. All these initiatives, coupled with our own drive to be at the leading edge of innovation to provide industry leading services and solutions, have led us to achieve phenomenal growth against all odds. We started 2020 with a revenue of around $100 million and ended the year with the same numbers reaching over $350 million.

Where do we go from here?

We are standing in the midst of tremendous opportunities. Digital business transformation is booming around the world and we can do a lot if we act fast and smart. First and foremost, we need to make sure that we execute on the State Bank of Pakistan’s digital payments vision and roll out quickly at scale. Second, public sector entities need to be digitally transformed as well so that public services are more accessible to the common man. Third, we need to enable our people with education, especially higher education, by ensuring that the right analytical and critical thinking is being infused in skills training so that the masses can join in and increase the supply of this industry that has such phenomenal potential.

Who will benefit from it all?

In one word: everyone. Businesses won’t have to rely on subsidies from the government as they will unlock massive levels of efficiency that technology and digital transformation can bring to make them more competitive in the world and increase our exports. Public sector can deliver more transparent, accessible services to the citizens which will boost their satisfaction and trust. Already occupying a major chunk of our population, the youth of our country will find massive employment opportunities in the IT sector because of the high demand.

Parting thoughts

As someone who has witnessed the dawn of digital transformation in Pakistan, I have firm belief that the Digital Pakistan Vision can achieve extraordinary success. While the foundation has already been laid out, a collaborative, coordinated, and focused effort is required to build on it to ensure that the vision of a connected, skilled, and technologically equipped Pakistan is a reality.