Trax sold its parcel network to a listed trucking group, then turned lender

Finova's lending platform, which SLGTrax agreed in January 2026 to buy, financed 1.2 million shipments and recorded Rs3.5 billion of lending in its pilot. Divide one by the other and the average advance was about Rs2,900. That is the size of an ordinary online order, which tells you what kind of lender the Karachi group wants to be. It is not offering working capital to factories. It is advancing small sums against individual parcels in transit.

Six years without outside money

Trax launched in mid 2017 as a delivery company for online sellers and funded itself until March 2023, when it announced a $3.7 million seed round co led by Amaana Capital and Tricap Investments, with PNO Ventures and angel investors taking part. At that point it said it served more than 7,000 online merchants, employed over 2,000 people and ran the third largest delivery network in Pakistan, reaching 95 percent of the population through more than 100 warehouses, hubs and retail points. Its method was a by road line haul system between cities. Cofounder Hassan Khan said when the round was announced: "We have built Trax with hard work and passion while funding ourselves because of our strong belief in the model."

Khan has since put the company's peak annual revenue at Rs10 billion. Its customers included Bank Alfalah, JS Bank, AlKaram and Generation.

Sold into a listed group

Secure Logistics Group, which listed on the Pakistan Stock Exchange in 2024, moves long and medium haul freight with more than 300 commercial vehicles and sells asset tracking, fleet management and security services. In October 2024 it and Trax Online agreed to combine. The Competition Commission approved the purchase of all of Trax Online by Secure Logistics in May 2025 and classed it as a conglomerate merger, one with no horizontal or vertical overlap. In plain terms, one company hauled goods between cities and the other carried them to doors, so the regulator saw no competition to protect.

The merged company trades as SLGTrax, with 417 million shares. Trax Global holds about 28 percent. Hassan Khan became group deputy chief executive for ecommerce, logistics and warehousing under group chief executive Gulraiz Khan, who has described the old Secure Logistics business as "static legacy industrial logistics". The group projects savings of about Rs600 million a year from the merger and reported a post merger round of $4 million for technology and regional expansion. The deal turned a self funded startup into a minority holder of a listed company, one whose share price and filings anyone can check.

Why a courier can lend

The lending idea follows from how Pakistan shops online. More than 90 percent of online purchases are paid in cash on delivery, according to the group's own account. The courier collects the cash at the door and hands it to the merchant days later; the group puts that wait at 15 to 25 days. A small seller with no bank credit has paid for stock and shipping and has nothing coming in until the rider returns.

A courier knows things a bank does not: which parcel is on which route, whether it has been delivered, and how often that merchant's orders are refused at the door. That is data a lender can score without a credit history. It is also why the cash is the collateral. The parcel's expected payout is what repays the advance, and a returned parcel produces no payout. Return rates are therefore the central risk in the business, and the group has not published its own.

The group's subsidiary LogiServe received a licence as a non bank finance company from the Securities and Exchange Commission of Pakistan in 2025. On 6 January 2026 SLGTrax told the stock exchange it had signed a binding head of terms with Singapore's Finova Technologies to buy its software and digital lending facilities for Rs500 million in cash, subject to regulatory approvals, due diligence and a definitive agreement, with completion targeted for the end of February 2026.

Reading the pilot figures

The disclosed pilot began in February 2025. SLGTrax says it deployed Rs75 million with selected ecommerce merchants and that about Rs4.5 billion of lending and transactions passed through. Finova's platform separately recorded 1.2 million financed shipments, Rs3.5 billion of lending and Rs17 billion of wallet payments. Those are different measures, and none of them gives a loan book at any moment, a default rate or a price charged to merchants.

A working shows the capital question. Suppose every advance stayed out for the full 15 to 25 day wait. Rs3.5 billion lent over roughly eleven months, from February to early January, would then need between about Rs160 million and Rs260 million outstanding at any one time. The disclosed pilot capital was Rs75 million, so the loans either turned over faster than the wait, repaid as parcels were delivered, or were funded in other ways. The filings do not say which. They also leave open how a rollout to about 9,000 retail and 300 corporate ecommerce clients would be funded, since that is many times the pilot. Put another way, at about Rs2,900 an advance, Rs75 million funds only some 25,900 parcels at a time, against 1.2 million shipments financed, so each rupee of capital had to be reused many times.

Two numbers for the purchase

The head of terms puts the price at Rs500 million in cash. The shareholder resolution passed at the extraordinary general meeting on 29 January 2026, with 99.98 percent of votes cast in favour, authorised something different: the issue of 7,938,679 ordinary shares at Rs21.20 each to CAPNEXA (Private) Limited as consideration for the software asset. That is about Rs168 million at the issue price, and a registered valuer is to set the software's value. How the share issue sits beside the cash figure is not explained in the notices.

The company expected to close within the first quarter of 2026, and the magazine found no later disclosure confirming completion or a commercial launch of the lending product. The next place to look is the exchange's announcements for the definitive agreement and for the first reported loan book of LogiServe.