ABHI started in 2021 with eight of us in one shared room and little else, chasing a question that seemed obvious once said out loud: why should someone who has already earned their salary wait until payday to touch it? Plenty of people told us it wouldn’t work, that a small Pakistani fintech had no business fixing something banks hadn’t bothered to. That became Earned Wage Access anyway, then payroll lending, then working capital for small merchants. A few years in, we bought a struggling microfinance bank, a move not seen by a fintech in Pakistan, but it has been done abroad. We inherited real depositors, real branches and a real turnaround, not just a product roadmap, and it took the better part of two years to get the institution healthy again. A listing can look, from the outside, like a tidy ending. It has not felt tidy from the inside.

ABHI Microfinance Bank holds a microfinance banking license in Pakistan, branch and branchless, run with the speed and discipline of a technology........

© Dawn