Branchless banking transactions surpass 1bn for first time in single quarter (2QFY24)

April 05, 2024 (MLN):  For the first time ever, the number of Branchless Banking (BB) Transactions has crossed 1 billion in a single quarter, as shown in the recently released data for the second quarter of fiscal year 2024 by the State Bank of Pakistan (SBP).

Among these, bill payments and mobile top-ups account for 22%, while fund transfers represent an impressive 43% of total BB transactions.

According to the breakup provided by the central bank of these BB transactions, customer-oriented transactions comprised the major proportion and stood at 1.08bn, while the remaining 4 million were agent-related (for liquidity purposes).

Meanwhile, the province-wise breakdown shows that the majority of these transactions (66%) came from Punjab (Including ISB), followed by Sindh (18%) and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (12%).

The central bank also detailed further with gender-wise segregation of BB accounts across Pakistan. As per this, males dominated with a share of 69.4%, while the proportion of females stood at 30.6% out of the total 114.64m BB accounts in 2QFY24.

The average deposit in accounts stood at Rs1,007 in 2QFY24, compared to the average balance of Rs991 witnessed in 1QFY24.

Likewise, the value of transactions also expanded during this quarter and stood at Rs5.06bn, around 12.45% higher on a quarterly basis.

Furthermore, the number of active accounts inched up by 1.93% to 64.12m during the review quarter (2QFY24).

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