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СпутникиРНSpaceXРоскосмосNASAPakistan’s capital markets have a persistent, well-documented problem: almost nobody is in them. Retail penetration sits below 1% of GDP, a figure every fintech founder in the space can recite from memory, and one that hasn’t moved much despite more than a decade of digital wealth apps promising to fix it. The newest version of that pitch adds a layer: instead of just a better app, founders now promise AI – AI advisors, AI infrastructure, AI agents that can do at scale what human relationship managers do for the wealthy.
Ping Up, a Karachi- and London-based wealth aggregator, is one of the companies making that pitch.
In an exclusive interview with Business Recorder, co-founders Wajahat Jafri and Syed Affan Aslam laid out both halves of the business – a consumer wealth app that has been running for two and a half years, and an AI-driven capital-markets infrastructure push they’re just beginning to build.
The gap between how confidently they describe those two things and how much of either currently exists is worth examining closely, and Ping Up’s own numbers, laid out plainly and at length by its founders, illustrate it well.
“Educate, enable, empower”
Jafri and Aslam’s account of the problem comes from direct experience. Jafri spent, in his words, a “good 14, 15 years in the banking industry,” with Aslam coming from a similar background. We discussed the period before Ping Up existed, and Jafri spoke of the origin and mission: “We had written out almost four to five pointers, and at the top of them was financial literacy.”
That diagnosis shaped the company’s structure around “three pillars: educate, enable, and empower,” he said.
“We wanted to educate them first… and obviously then once they are enabled, the empowerment will be there.” In “very simple words”, Ping Up is “a wealth management platform which is bridging a gap between investors and financial products through financial literacy”.
The consumer side is a marketplace, not an advisor – a distinction both founders returned to repeatedly. “We treat ourselves as a marketplace, not advisors,” Aslam said.
“Although we have the licence to advise, we do not advise … We will educate them about everything, but the decision is going to be theirs.”
Suitability is handled through an in-app calculator rather than personal recommendation, steering shorter-term investors away from high-risk funds automatically.
On revenue, Aslam was specific: “Our main source of revenue is our management fee, which comes from assets under management,” alongside a “front-end load, which is basically a sales transactional commission.”
On the B2B side, “we charge a development and integration fee, and then there is a recurring maintenance fee.”
Jafri added a point he considered important: the management fee is “something we charge, but not to the customers. We get it from our product partners. So from the customer’s point of view, it is absolutely free.”
Inherited infrastructure
Aslam traced Ping Up’s technology strategy to an explicit model: BlackRock, which built its Aladdin platform and, in doing so, “was able to capture a lot of data streams across the world.”
Ping Up’s ambition, he said, is similar – partnering with asset managers and financial markets “so that we can get access to that entire infrastructure… It’s a complete strategy of five, six years.”
Asked what would make the company’s growth targets realistic rather than aspirational, Aslam didn’t point to marketing or funding: “infrastructure,” he said.
“Other digital distributors or asset management companies usually focus on their AUM [Assets Under Management]… We like to call ourselves a wealth management infrastructure provider.”
What’s actually live
That infrastructure ambition extends furthest into Ping Up’s newest line of work: AI agents built for banks and asset managers rather than Ping Up’s own retail customers.
“We are also the pioneers in AI in the capital market,” Aslam said, citing one of Pakistan’s largest banks deploying Ping Up’s AI bots “across 12,000 branches.”
The pitch to institutions is cost and reach: an AI bot works around the clock at a fraction of the staffing cost, and “you don’t really have to queue up to get advice.”
Scaled up, he said, this kind of infrastructure could eventually help process “about 7% of the overall retail bulk in the country – that is our aspiration.”
None of it is live yet, however. Asked directly, Aslam was clear: it’s in pilot, targeting launch in “the next three months.”
Both founders were emphatic that Ping Up itself does not advise customers, precisely so it can avoid the liability that comes with giving financial advice.
But the AI agents they described are explicitly built to replace bank staff who, in Aslam’s words, currently “advise people about different sorts of mutual funds.”
Asked who is responsible if an AI-generated recommendation causes harm, Aslam didn’t hedge: “If we have this licence, we will be held responsible” for the output – a direct answer, but one that puts Ping Up squarely into the advisory liability its consumer product was structured to avoid, just on the B2B side.
On the underlying technical risk, Aslam was candid: “AI also has a lot of problems… hallucinations” among them. Ping Up’s approach keeps anything numerical outside generative models – “LLMs were never created to do mathematics” – reserving them for natural-language interaction, where it cannot be 100% accurate, because they are statistical.
“If anyone in the world is saying that it can be 100% perfect, they must be lying.”
The 20 billion figure, unpacked
Jafri and Aslam’s standout Ping Up figure is Rs20 billion. This number was once the 2030 target, but Ping Up reached it four years early. “Yes, Rs20 billion was the target we set for 2030, but we have achieved this in 2026,” Jafri said.
“This shows the interest the customers are taking in the product.” The gross wealth volume processed in 2026 accounts for Rs8 billion.
One distinction is worth keeping in mind: the Rs20 billion figure describes cumulative volume processed over time – a flow, not a snapshot – while current AUM was separately cited at roughly the same figure.
That the two happen to coincide is worth noting rather than assuming they describe the same thing; AUM measures what’s currently invested at a point in time, while the cumulative figure includes money since withdrawn or moved elsewhere. Alongside both sits gross revenue of roughly Rs100 million last year, around 12,000 active customers, and 40,000 to 50,000 total app downloads since launch.
Funding and financing
On financing, the founders were specific and largely consistent.
A friends-and-family pre-seed round came first, and then again in “23… we did another round, and that was it.”
Since October 2023, Aslam said, “we have not raised any funds further” – the business has instead been “running it profitably and cash flow positively. Whatever we make goes back into the system.”
Valuation moved quickly in the early rounds: from $400,000 to $3.2 million within a year of entering the market, to $10 million at the most recent round.
The investor base, notably, isn’t the venture-capital or family-office money common in fintech origin stories.
Aslam framed the lack of outside funding as differentiation rather than constraint: “We did not do any venture capital or any family office round as yet… usually products go through the cycle of burning cash, and they keep raising funds. We are very different. We almost run a product company like a utility store… operating at 75%+ gross margin, and cash flow positive.”
If accurate, that’s an unusual position for a fintech at this stage.
Who is this actually for?
On the core question – is Ping Up bringing new people into capital markets or making it easier for people who were investing anyway – Aslam offered a checkable claim: “most of our customers never invested in mutual funds,” evidenced by fresh account creation at the country’s four largest asset managers, which together hold more than 60% of industry AUM.
When an onboarding flag doesn’t show a pre-existing account, he argued, “it simply means that they were never onboarded.” It’s a plausible mechanism, though the interview didn’t include any independent verification of the underlying data.
Jafri was candid that Ping Up’s ambition runs in two directions at once – toward genuinely new investors, and toward existing ones that the company wants to diversify across more products under “one CNIC.”
On why retail participation remains so low in the first place, both founders didn’t hesitate to point to “financial literacy, more than anything,” with Aslam recalling personally that he himself “did not have a mutual fund account when I started,” despite having learned about them. “A lot of people did not even know what mutual funds were.”
What would prove it
Asked what would convince them, five years out, that Ping Up had materially expanded participation in Pakistan’s capital markets, Aslam pointed to customer net worth growing over time as the metric he personally tracks: “If I help you increase your overall wealth over time… then Ping Up will be successful. If we are not able to do it, we won’t be successful.”
Jafri was more concrete, citing the company’s actual internal target: reaching “almost half a million” customers by 2030 – up from roughly 12,000 active today.
That’s a real, falsifiable number, offered without hedging.
It sits alongside a small but telling lesson from the Rs20 billion figure: Ping Up’s own 2030 target is being reached by 2026, four years ahead of schedule.
Jafri framed the stakes regionally: “We are competing with our neighbouring countries like India and Bangladesh, where the penetration is almost double-digit percentages of their GDP. We are still on the single-digit side.”
Whether AI infrastructure, still in pilot, becomes the thing that closes the gap – or simply a newer story layered onto numbers that remain modest by regional standards – is a question this interview leaves open, and one only the next few years of disclosed figures will answer.
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