With Alibaba entering the “Buy Now, Pay Later” space and QisstPay making a comeback, what has changed?

For decades, Pakistan has run on credit. Not the kind that shows up on balance sheets or credit scores but the kind negotiated across shop counters, backed by personal guarantees, and enforced through relationships rather than contracts. 

Walk into an electronics market in Lahore or a motorcycle dealership in Karachi, and you will find offline versions of Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) operating in their most basic form - goods exchanged on trust, payments spread over time and prices inflated to absorb risk. Installment buying has long been embedded in the country’s economic fabric and its scale is understood to be massive but opaque and informal. 

In essence, what fintech calls BNPL is, in Pakistan, less an innovation than an attempt to digitize a system that never needed software to begin with. That is the market Alibaba Group is now entering through its subsidiary Koko Tech Private Limited. On Tuesday, the Securities and Exchange Commission of Pakistan (SECP) granted Koko the NBFC license - the default license for low-ticket lending such as nano lending and buy now pay later. Koko had been trying to do BNPL in Pakistan for a few years and had been in talks with Pakistani BNPL companies. 

This is also the market that Qisst Pay, a former Pakistani BNPL player that quietly wrapped up in 2024, is re-entering, its CEO Jordan Olivas confirmed to Profit. 

On the surface, it signals renewed confidence in a financial services category that once promised to transform consumer finance in Pakistan. Underneath, it raises a more difficult question: What has changed?