QisstPay said it was not a lender, announced a lender's licence, then closed

In 2021 QisstPay described itself in two ways that do not sit easily together. In May its cofounder, Jordan Olivas, said in an interview that the Islamabad buy now pay later company was not a lender. It bought the merchant's invoice and gave the shopper a short term on part of the price.

“We are not offering lines of credit. We're not issuing loans.”

Seven months later, on 24 December, the company announced that the Securities and Exchange Commission of Pakistan had awarded it a buy now pay later licence on 21 December, issued as a non banking finance company licence. QisstPay called it the first of its kind in Pakistan and said it would let the company move into house financing, car financing and micro lending. That is the company's account of the licence, not a regulator's statement. By 2024, according to Profit, the company had quietly wrapped up.

A model that kept changing shape

QisstPay was founded in November 2020. In the May 2021 interview Olivas laid out the first design. A shopper paid 50 percent at purchase and the rest 30 days later, a cycle chosen to match Pakistani pay days. Signing up needed only a phone number, an address and a card for the first payment, with no photo ID or CNIC. Risk was scored from a transaction model, a merchant model and a consumer model. Olivas said losses were within QisstPay's acceptable range, though they would horrify a provider in the United States, and that the model rested on a limited data set.

By September 2021 the product had moved on. The company's release spoke of instalments chosen at checkout with no interest and no late fees, and a financial trade report described four instalments for purchases from Rs1,500 to Rs500,000, repaid by card. QisstPay's business page today offers 2 to 12 instalments. Finovate converted that range to about $9 to $3,000.

The change matters because of how much of a basket is unpaid once the shopper leaves checkout. Under the original 50 percent split, half is outstanding. With four equal instalments and the first taken at checkout, which is our assumption because the release does not say, three quarters is. With 12 equal instalments on the same assumption it is eleven twelfths, about 92 percent. On the largest basket of Rs500,000, the unpaid amount moves from Rs250,000 to Rs375,000 and then to about Rs458,000, and it is collected over months instead of one month.

A $15 million round, part of it debt

On 29 September 2021 QisstPay announced $15 million in seed and pre seed funding, a mix of equity and debt with no split disclosed. MSA Capital led. Global Founders Capital, Fox Ventures and First Check Ventures took part, with angels including the cofounders of the Italian company Scalapay and United Bank Limited. The company said the money would fund transactions, grow its Islamabad team to more than 100 people by the end of the year and prepare a move into Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.

The debt is the piece to watch. Buy now pay later firms commonly fund the gap between paying the merchant and collecting from the shopper with borrowed money, and use equity to absorb losses. Disclosing the total without the split makes it impossible to judge how much cushion sat under the book.

The company also claimed week on week growth of 92 percent and more than 500 retailers, among them Samsung, Philips, Xiaomi, Lenovo, Sapphire and elo, which it called the country's largest Shopify store. Held for ten weeks, 92 percent weekly growth multiplies volume about 680 times, so the rate cannot be a trend anyone could keep. Elo's cofounder Umar Qamar said in the release that the store had seen a spike of 85 percent on average order value. The business page today claims increases of up to 45 percent, with no method or sample size.

Expansion, then silence

In February 2022 Olivas, by then chief executive, said in an interview that QisstPay was entering the United States with a checkout tool for retailers, had opened an office in Bangladesh and planned to add 200 employees to reach 350 by the end of that year. He added a larger aim. American Banker put the headcount at that point at 150, against the more than 100 the company had promised for the end of 2021.

“The plan will bring hundreds of jobs to Pakistan and the goal is to become one of the first unicorns in Pakistan.”

Profit reported on 20 April 2026 that QisstPay had quietly wrapped up in 2024 and was returning to the market, as Olivas confirmed to the paper. The same report said Alibaba's subsidiary Koko Tech had received a non banking finance licence from the SECP, the licence the report calls the default for low ticket lending such as buy now pay later.

What the comeback page says

QisstPay's current business page describes a different company from the one that raised $15 million. It says QisstPay does not lend money and does not provide funding. Merchants add a button to checkout, and each shopper is identity verified and risk scored against QisstPay's shared customer network. The instalments are funded by the merchant through its own payment gateway, and the cash never passes through QisstPay, which supplies underwriting, reminders, fraud checks and a dashboard. Signing up starts a 30 day underwriting window at no upfront cost. No fee rate is published.

In our reading, this moves QisstPay from carrying credit risk to selling a risk engine, with the merchant funding the instalments. That is a lighter business, and it would explain why the page names no licence or regulator. It also leaves open who absorbs the loss when a shopper stops paying, which decides whether a software fee that is not published is enough. The contrast with 2021 is sharp. The December 2021 release presented a licence that would let QisstPay move into house financing, car financing and micro lending, while the page now says it does not lend and does not provide funding at all.

QisstPay's consumer site invites shoppers to sign up now so that their accounts are underwritten before launch.