For a family living on daily wages, a smartphone is rarely a luxury. It is how people find work, study, receive payments, and run small businesses. Yet for millions of people in Pakistan, the price of a decent handset still stands between them and all of that.
The difficulty is not unwillingness to pay. A street vendor, a tailor, or a delivery rider may manage money carefully week after week, but their income is rarely recorded in the formal way a bank expects. Without a salary slip, a regular bank statement, or an earlier loan repaid on time, a lender cannot easily judge repayment ability, and households outside the conventional banking system end up excluded rather than assessed differently.
Pakistan’s Digital Access Gap
The scale of the gap is striking. The Pakistan Bureau of Statistics Household Integrated Economic Survey for 2024-25 found that half of all people aged ten and above owned a mobile phone, including smartphones. Behind that figure sits a sharp divide: ownership reached 69 percent among males but only 31 percent among females.
Coverage alone has not closed the divide. A GSMA report published in August 2025 estimated that mobile broadband reached 81 percent of Pakistan’s population, while only 29 percent actually used mobile internet during 2024. For a household balancing food, rent, school costs, and medicine, a phone must compete with every essential expense, while import dependence, duties, and taxes push the upfront price higher still. Spreading that cost over several months changes the calculation: a payment fitting a weekly or monthly budget feels possible in a way that a single large payment does not.
Credit Barriers Restrict Smartphone Financing
Pakistan is not starting from nothing. Providers such as Kistpay already sell smartphones on instalments, including through partnerships with telecom operators. The challenge is extending such schemes to buyers furthest from formal credit. When a lender has no credit history to check and no documented income to verify, caution is understandable, and financing costs and default risk make providers reluctant to widen their customer base.
What is needed is not simply more lending, but better ways of judging who can repay. Verified records of everyday financial activity could help, with proper affordability checks. A pattern of regular top-ups, bill payments, or small business transactions may tell a lender more about a person’s habits than the absence of a bank loan ever could. The aim should be a wider, fairer pool of borrowers, not weaker standards, so buyers are not pushed into unsustainable payments and providers are not left with losses forcing them to withdraw.
Open Banking Could Expand Access to Credit
A recent regulatory step could open up exactly that kind of assessment. On October 30, 2026, the State Bank of Pakistan released draft Open Banking Regulations for public consultation. Under such a system, customers could allow their financial data to be shared securely, with their consent, so a lender could look beyond a thin borrowing history. Someone with steady transactions but no previous loan would no longer be invisible; their own financial activity, shared on their terms, could become the evidence qualifying them.
Finalising a clear smartphone financing framework would also give providers more confidence about the rules around repayment and persistent defaults. Certainty of that kind allows a company to plan, invest, and offer instalments to more customers, rather than keeping a scheme small and cautious.
Telecom Operators Seek Regulatory Support
The telecom industry itself has pressed for a clearer framework. In a joint letter to the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority dated May 7, 2026, Jazz, PTCL/Ufone, Telenor, and Zong asked for regulatory support for wider device financing. Their joint stance shows how central affordability has become to the sector’s future.
The operators also confronted the hardest part of any financing scheme: what happens when payments stop. They suggested a graduated process, starting with reminders, advance notice, and a chance to settle what is owed, before any restriction on the financed handset. Blocking a SIM would be treated only as a last resort, with customer consent and consumer protection safeguards, alongside proportionate limits, dispute resolution, hardship protection, and quick restoration once overdue amounts are paid, with a review after the first year.
Lower Smartphone Prices Remain Important
Financing reform alone will not finish the job. If the underlying price of a basic smartphone stays high, instalments merely stretch an unaffordable cost over a longer period. Reviewing the duties and taxes on handsets could bring the starting price down, making every instalment smaller and every financing decision easier. Lower prices and better credit assessment are not alternatives; they reinforce each other.
The stakes go beyond individual convenience. As education, job applications, banking, and government services move online, a person without a smartphone risks being left behind in ways that compound over time. Closing the device gap is therefore not only a commercial question. It is a question about who gets to take part in the digital economy, and progress will depend on financing terms fitting household budgets, recovery rules balancing accountability with protection, and prices that do not put the first step out of reach.
