Safepay waited years for a licence, and its published volume is still modest

Safepay's website says it processed more than Rs2 billion in the last year from more than 200,000 unique customers. Divide the first number by the second and the average customer paid about Rs10,000 over the year, roughly Rs167 million of payments a month across the whole business. At about Rs280 to the dollar, the Rs2 billion is near $7 million. That is the scale of a Karachi company that Stripe backed with a seven figure seed round in 2021 and that holds a commercial licence from the State Bank of Pakistan.

A beta switched off

Ziyad Parekh and Raza Naqvi founded Safepay in 2019 to build digital payment tools for Pakistani merchants. A beta product grew to about 300 merchants across the country. Then, about a year after launch, the founders took the services offline. The next stage of the business had to operate inside the State Bank's framework for payment system operators and payment service providers, and the beta did not.

The company joined the Y Combinator summer 2020 batch, receiving $150,000, and describes itself as the first Pakistani fintech to graduate from the programme. The seed round followed on 11 February 2021, led by Stripe with Global Founders Capital, HOF Capital, Soma Capital, Mantis Venture Capital and Fatima Gobi Ventures. The amount was described only as seven figures in dollars. The company said it would spend on engineers, on payment options beyond cards, including wallets and bank accounts, and on regulatory compliance.

Four years from seed to licence

Safepay's own timeline shows how slowly the regulator's process moves. The State Bank gave in principle approval in June 2021. In August 2022 the company passed the second stage, a pilot test, and its own technology went live. The full commercial licence came in 2025, reported on 21 April of that year, which is four years and two months after the seed round and close to six years after the founders began.

The delay was not peculiar to Safepay. The State Bank issued its first operator licence in this category to 1Link in 2015 and then issued no operational licence for about five years. When Safepay's licence was reported, it was one of six operators to have launched commercial services in Pakistan, while the licences of three others had been revoked for non compliance and other reasons. In this business a licence is scarce, and it can be taken away.

What the product does

Safepay lets a merchant take cards through one checkout. Its product list includes hosted and embedded checkout, payment links that need no code, subscriptions for repeat charges and a vault. The vault stores card details as tokens: the merchant keeps a reference rather than the card number, so a breach of the merchant's systems does not expose the card number. Safepay has said it has an exclusive partnership with Visa's Cybersource for card processing.

In 2024 it added payment orchestration, which means a merchant connects once and Safepay decides which processor handles each payment. In practice that lets a failed payment be retried through a second route and stops a merchant being tied to a single acquiring bank. It also makes Safepay a layer above the rails rather than the owner of them, so its margin depends on routing and checkout quality, not on controlling the pipes. The same year it launched an onsite payment app for Shopify, which suits the many small Pakistani online sellers who already run their shops there.

Why the licence is the product

A payment gateway sits between a shopper, the merchant's bank and the shopper's bank. When a customer pays, the gateway passes the card details, or a token standing in for them, to the processor, receives an approval or a refusal in seconds, and later arranges settlement into the merchant's account. Anyone can build the checkout page. What the State Bank regulates is the part that touches the money, and without a licence a company can show a payment form but cannot route funds between banks on its own authority. That is why Safepay's beta had to stop in 2020, and why its 2022 pilot approval counted as a milestone rather than a formality.

The company filled the years between approval stages with product. By its own timeline it launched Embedded Checkout, Quick Links, tokenization and subscriptions in 2023, and in 2024 added payment orchestration, a second version of Embedded Checkout with one click payment, and the Shopify app. Its site also lists offers and a tool called Atoms. Each addition widens what a merchant can do on a single integration, which is how a gateway raises the volume per merchant without finding new merchants.

What the one figure can and cannot show

The website does not say which twelve months the figures cover, how many transactions make up the Rs2 billion, or how that money splits between local and international cards. Nor does Safepay publish revenue, profit or pricing, so the magazine does not estimate any of them.

Scale matters here for a simple reason. A gateway earns a small slice of each payment, so its income grows only with the money that flows through it, while its costs for engineers, compliance and security are largely fixed. A company that took years to reach commercial status has to cover those costs from its volume. Safepay's own statement of more than 200,000 customers and Rs2 billion is the only public evidence of where that volume stands.

What the arithmetic does support is a comparison within the company's own claims. An average of Rs10,000 per customer is the size of a few online orders over twelve months, which suggests customers buy from Safepay merchants occasionally rather than daily. It does not show how many merchants sit behind them, which is the number a gateway grows by. The next useful disclosures would be a merchant count, a transaction count and a dated volume figure, set against the licence date in 2025. As of 2 November 2026 the magazine found no newer funding announcement or volume figure from the company.