KARACHI: Six companies entered SBP's first fintech sandbox. Four have now emerged with successful demonstrations. The State Bank of Pakistan has just closed the book on its first Regulatory Sandbox cohort, and the gap between who started and who finished tells its own story about how demanding this process actually was.
SBP shortlisted six applicants back in January under its Regulatory Sandbox initiative, part of the central bank's Vision 2028 push toward digital financial innovation. The programme let selected firms trial live products inside a controlled environment for up to six months. This week, SBP confirmed only four of those six survived the process with a successful demonstration.
Taptap Send UK Limited and United Bank Limited cleared testing together on inward remittances, running a technology-enabled solution for one of Pakistan's most closely watched financial corridors. Three more firms Digi Khata, Swich Retail, and Neem Exponential Financial Services passed testing under the open banking theme, each piloting a distinct approach to a category that could support broader financial inclusion and digital-finance objectives in Pakistan.
Two Names Missing From the Final List
Notably absent from the list of successful completions: Barq Fintech and the Bank of Punjab, both of which made the original shortlist in January. SBP's statement doesn't explain what happened to either. The central bank simply confirms which four demonstrated their solutions successfully, leaving the fate of the other two applicants unaddressed for now.
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SBP is drawing a hard line on what this actually means for consumers. Completing sandbox testing does not equal regulatory approval, the bank stated plainly. Every one of the four successful participants still needs to secure formal authorisation from SBP before launching commercially. In other words, passing through the SBP Regulatory Sandbox gets these fintechs a seat at the next table, not a ticket to the market.
What SBP Plans to Do With the Lessons
What SBP does want the industry to take from this cohort is different: lessons. The central bank says the findings, learnings and regulatory recommendations generated by this first round will directly shape the frameworks it builds for the wider financial sector going forward. That framing turns four individual product tests into something closer to a live policy experiment one where Pakistan's central bank is learning the rules of open banking and digital remittances in real time, alongside the companies it's regulating.
Inside the Sandbox: Three Themes, One Launch Date
The Regulatory Sandbox itself launched in May 2025, built around three focus areas: inward remittances, open banking, and remote merchant onboarding. SBP says the initiative drew strong interest from both regulated financial institutions and local and international fintech firms from the outset, a detail that lines up with a joint bank-fintech pairing making it through on the remittance side.
For a country pushing hard on financial inclusion and digital payments infrastructure, the real headline isn't the four names that passed. It's what SBP does with the lessons those four names generated through the SBP Regulatory Sandbox because the next regulatory framework for Pakistan's fintech sector is being built, right now, on the back of exactly this kind of live testing.