Cheques on government assignment accounts end on 15 November, and a quarter of public payments were still not digital in June

Government offices that pay people by cheque from Asaan Assignment Accounts have until 15 November. From 16 November, every payment from those accounts is to go through Raast, the State Bank's instant payment system, the Prime Minister's office said after a meeting on the cashless economy in Islamabad on Friday 6 November. Most government institutions are to finish digitising their payments by December. The cut off covers those accounts only, not every government payment, and the December target is for the wider switch.

Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif also ordered a roadmap with targets and timelines for a fully digital payment system and told officials to fix consumers' problems with digital payments immediately. The Raast QR scheme for payments from consumers to merchants will continue, and a media campaign will urge electricity and gas customers to pay by scanning the QR code printed on their bills. Federal ministers, State Bank Governor Jameel Ahmad and provincial chief secretaries attended.

Officials told the meeting that the drawing and disbursing officers, the staff who release government payments, have been trained for the switch. All Benazir Income Support Programme payments already go to digital wallets, and work is under way on a digital payment method for places without internet.

How much is still outside

The best baseline is a Finance Ministry document submitted to the National Assembly and reported by ProPakistani on 16 October. It says government to person payments through Raast and digital banking rose from Rs472 billion in July 2025 to Rs4.402 trillion by June 2026, which it puts at 76 percent of all disbursements by federal and provincial governments. Raast alone carried more than 84 percent of government to person payments by count, 39.5 million transactions.

Two sums follow from those figures. If Rs4.402 trillion is 76 percent, total disbursements were about Rs5.79 trillion (4.402 divided by 0.76), which leaves about Rs1.39 trillion, or 24 percent, still moving by other means. For the self accounting entities, which were allocated Rs1.669 trillion, the document says Rs1.247 trillion, or 75 percent, was paid digitally. That leaves Rs422 billion (1.669 minus 1.247) outside the system.

State owned enterprises were further behind. By value, 34 percent of their payments to people and 18.4 percent of the payments they receive from people were digital. Pakistan Railways and Ehsaas Assignment Accounts are among the bodies still being integrated. The meeting's statement does not give the value of Asaan Assignment Accounts, so how much of the Rs1.39 trillion the 15 November cut off covers is not known.

From cheque to Raast

A cheque is an instruction on paper or in an image that has to be presented, cleared between banks and then credited, which takes days. A Raast payment is sent by the payer's institution and credited to the payee's account within seconds, at any hour, to an account identified by a number the payer keys in or reads from a QR code. For someone paid by the government, that means money arrives sooner. For the government, it means no printing, signing or couriering of cheques, and a record that names the payee.

The cost moves to data quality. A payee needs an account or wallet that Raast can reach, and the paying office must hold the right account number for each of them. A cheque can be stopped before it clears, but an instant payment to a wrong or mistyped account is harder to recover. That is why the training of disbursing officers, more than the technology, is likely to decide how smooth the first weeks are.

Who gains and who adjusts

Anyone paid from these accounts gains speed and a trail they can show a bank. Offices with outdated payee records, and payees without an account, have to adjust. The merchant side is further along: the same document counts 2.03 million active digital commerce payment points as of June 2026, up from a baseline of 500,000, and says 1.73 million merchants actively use Raast QR payments. Printing QR codes on utility bills sends a second stream of government related payments into that network.

The first test comes on 16 November, when payments from Asaan Assignment Accounts begin to run on Raast.