Halima Iqbal is the cofounder and chief executive of Oraan, a Karachi fintech that puts the rotating savings committees Pakistani households already use onto a phone. Members are vetted, the pooled money is collected and paid out through an app, and the company's stated aim is financial inclusion for women, who it says are the people the country's banks serve least.
Her route there was the reverse of the usual one. She spent roughly ten years in Canada, first in investment banking and then consulting for North American banks on fintech products at First Derivatives, before moving back to Pakistan in 2017. She knew money professionally. What she did not expect was how hard her home country's banks would make it to become a customer.
Oraan is now eight years old. It has more than 100,000 members by its own count, has raised just over $4 million in total, and in 2025 added a gold savings product. It has not called itself a bank, and nothing public suggests it holds a banking licence. A women first digital bank is an ambition, not a status the company has claimed.
Three and a half months for a basic account
Iqbal has told the story of her return many times, because it is the origin of the company. Back in Karachi with a decade of banking behind her, she tried to open an ordinary account.
“I had a really hard time opening up a basic bank account. It took me about three and a half months.”
The experience was not unusual. TechCrunch, citing Oraan's own research, reported in 2021 that only about 7 percent of Pakistani women held even a basic bank account. Freelancers, micro entrepreneurs and homemakers without a salary were often asked why they needed an account, and sometimes for a husband's or male relative's details to act as guarantor. Pakistan also lacked a credit scoring system, which limited access to liquidity. If an experienced banker needed more than three months, the problem for a woman with no formal employment record was clearly larger.
Looking at what women already did
Iqbal's response was to start from existing behaviour instead of asking people to adopt a new product. Around 41 percent of Pakistanis, by the same Oraan research, had taken part in committees, the rotating savings circles known locally as beesees, in which a group pays a fixed sum each month and members take turns to collect the pot. The company estimated that about $5 billion rotated through them each year.
“Committees are already too prevalent in our culture so we wanted to offer something people are already comfortable with.”
The weakness of a traditional committee is trust: it depends on the organiser and on every member paying every month. Oraan's answer is to vet the members and run the collection and payout through its platform. TechCrunch reported that plans ran for five or ten months, that members could choose the month in which they collected, and that a treasury management system formed committees according to members' needs and ability to pay.
From first app to a team of four
The app launched in May 2019, Dawn reported in January 2020. At that point Oraan ran committees of ten months, with a commissioner in each group who managed the money in and out and, in return, received an earlier payout. Dawn listed the founding team as Iqbal as chief executive, Farwah Tapal on design, Eric Bhatti on technology and Taha Imam on finance.
The business model then was co selling. Oraan earned a percentage of the leads it passed to partner institutions, among them MCB Arif Habib, and Iqbal said the committees were a way to build trust before moving members towards Shariah compliant investments. She was open that committees themselves are a low return method, because they do not keep pace with inflation, which Dawn put at 12.63 percent in the month before publication. The company said it expected to raise a Series A in 2020. That did not happen on that timetable, and the next announced round came in September 2021.
A cofounder, a registration and a first title
In 2018 Iqbal founded Oraan in Karachi with Farwah Tapal, a design strategist who had recently returned from Spain. A Karandaaz case study says OraanTech Private Limited was registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission of Pakistan in August 2018 by a team of five, funded early by angel investors, and that Iqbal became chief executive in 2019.
She was not a first time founder. Profiles on Meaningful Business and the Startup Confessionals podcast note that she is a certified chef who cofounded Mealsurfers, a food technology business acquired in 2016, and that she was for a time the only female executive in the Pakistan Fintech Association. A banker, a chef and a founder who has sold a company is an unusual mix, and it helps explain why Oraan is built as a consumer product first and a financial one second.
Raising money where no woman had
In September 2021 Oraan announced a $3 million seed round jointly led by Zayn Capital, a returning investor, and Wavemaker Partners, with Resolution Ventures, i2i Ventures, Hustle Fund, Haitou Global and Plug and Play taking part. Dawn and Arab News both described it as the largest seed round closed by a women led startup in Pakistan, and Iqbal and Tapal told TechCrunch they were the first women entrepreneurs in the country's fintech sector to raise a seed round at all. Total funding stood at just over $4 million.
Dawn reported the next day that Oraan had more than 10,000 savers across more than 170 cities, 84 percent of them women, and that it had been selected for the regulatory sandbox of the Securities and Exchange Commission of Pakistan. Sandbox status matters because it lets a young company test a financial product under supervision before it is licensed in full. The long term plan she described to TechCrunch was a neobank offering savings, credit, insurance, education financing and investment products, with community features because women, she said, want a sense of belonging.
Growth kept close to the ground
By August 2023 Oraan said more than 100,000 members had saved through its digitised committees. Iqbal told ProPakistani then that the first question a woman hears at a bank is why she needs an account at all, a line that tells you how she thinks about the product: as a way around that question rather than an answer to it.
In November 2025 the company added Oraan Gold, which lets members buy fractional gold in price locked monthly instalments. Gold is already the savings habit of many Pakistani households, and the product follows the same logic as the committee, taking something people do anyway and making it safer and smaller. AsiaTechDaily reported that the gold line grew nearly 75 fold in its first seven months, and that Oraan had signed an agreement to license its savings and credit platform to a bank in an unnamed regional country. Neither figure has been independently checked.
In July 2026 Epic Angels announced an undisclosed investment in Oraan, joined by returning investors Wavemaker and i2i Ventures, to grow the gold product, build gold inventory and expand into new markets. Epic Angels had first backed the company in 2021. Its managing partner Maaike Doyer said access to credit for women in Pakistan was not really a technology problem but a trust problem.
“Women in Pakistan were never waiting for financial products, they were waiting for the financial system to catch up.”
What a women first bank would need
The ambition Iqbal set out in 2021, a women first digital bank built on community, remains the company line. The distance between that and a savings app is real. A bank holds deposits under a licence, lends against them and answers to a regulator, and Oraan today does none of that in its own name. The need is not in doubt: AsiaTechDaily cited the World Bank's estimate that in 2024 only 11.9 percent of Pakistani women had an account, against 42.3 percent of men.
What Oraan has instead is a customer base that trusts it for a narrow, useful job, a founder with the credentials to speak to regulators and investors, and fresh capital from backers who have already put money in once. The next steps are to turn savers into users of broader products, to show that the gold line can grow without losing the simplicity of the committee, and to decide whether the licence is worth pursuing. If she gets there, the account that took three and a half months to open in 2017 will have been the most productive delay of her career.
