Ninety-two percent of the money Pakistanis send home now arrives digitally, according to figures from the government’s cashless initiative review. Almost none of it stays: in FY2020 the banking system took in 16 deposits for every 100 cash withdrawals, and by FY2025 fewer than nine. The money lands on a rail that records it and is gone the same day.

There is a household I have never met. I can describe its month anyway, because the pattern is written into the remittance data several million times over. A woman in Gujranwala cannot borrow against the shop she has run for years, though her husband, let’s call him Nadeem, has sent money home from the Gulf every month for 11 years and never missed one. That is 132 transfers, Saudi Arabia first and then the Emirates, every one logged at both ends. To a Pakistani bank, both of them are strangers.

The assumption is that Pakistani banks do not recognize money sent from abroad. They do. In car financing, several accept remittances outright as evidence of income, requiring a run of consecutive deposits into a family member’s account. HabibMetro caps the monthly instalment at 40 percent of net income for salaried and business customers, and at 75 percent for remittance-based ones, treating money sent from abroad as steadier than a local salary. Its home financing product sets no minimum income requirement at all. These are Roshan Digital Account products, where the borrower is the overseas Pakistani and the relative in Pakistan is the co-applicant. Eleven years of transfers counts as income here. It buys a car.

Now take the collateral away. On an unsecured........

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