Client Name

Meezan Bank Limited

Faculty Advisor

Dr. Irum Saba

SBS Thought Leadership Areas

Behavioural Studies

SBS Thought Leadership Area Justification

This project aligns with Behavioural Studies because it investigates why customers with active Meezan Bank accounts consistently choose alternative payment platforms over their own bank card for international transactions. The findings reveal key behavioural patterns including capital isolation driven by security anxiety rather than cost, payment instrument stickiness where customers who migrated during Pakistan's 2022 to 2023 economic crisis did not return despite macroeconomic recovery, and a preference for fee transparency over lower headline rates. These patterns confirm that the decline in cross-border debit card spend is fundamentally a behavioural problem, and the recommendations are designed accordingly to address the psychological and experiential barriers rather than pricing alone.

Aligned SDGs

GOAL 8: Decent Work and Economic Growth

Aligned SDGs Justification

This project aligns with SDG 8 because reducing the cost and friction of international digital payments directly enables Pakistani freelancers, small business owners, and digital entrepreneurs to participate more efficiently in the global economy. High transaction fees, regulatory barriers, and poor digital onboarding are not just banking inconveniences but genuine obstacles to economic productivity and decent work. The recommendations in this project, including fee reductions, transparent pricing tools, digital onboarding improvements, and a Shariah-compliant business credit alternative, are designed to make formal banking infrastructure more accessible and affordable for these segments. By encouraging economic activity to remain within formal banking channels rather than migrating toward unregulated alternatives, the project directly supports productive employment, financial inclusion, and sustainable economic growth in alignment with the objectives of SDG 8.

NDA

No

Abstract

This Experiential Learning Project was commissioned by the Card Portfolio department of Meezan Bank Limited, the largest commercial Islamic bank in Pakistan to explore a strategic anomaly in its international debit card portfolio. The overall cross-border debit card expenditure decreased by 14 percent in 2023-2025 although the number of active international cardholders grew by 46.5 percent in the same period. The average transaction value decreased by half, PKR 8,145 to PKR 5,274 within the same period and it implies that high value international transactions are no longer being conducted with Meezan debit cards and only low value routine payments are being made.

The project was conducted in four key work streams. The former entailed three years of proprietary examination of transaction information on 1,014 records of twelve variants of cards monthly. The second one was the assessment of the regulatory environment and the foreign exchange. The third one was the comparison of fees structure with HBL, UBL, Bank Alfalah and Faysal Bank. The fourth looked at the competitive landscape in the fintech like NayaPay, SadaPay, and the new crypto-backed RedotPay. The research was guided by the structured interviews with seven industry participants such as digital agencies, e-commerce businesses, and a former fintech executive.

The general conclusion is that the three convergent forces result in the decline. The former is macroeconomic and regulatory repression due to the foreign exchange restrictions of the State Bank of Pakistan and the depreciation of the Pakistani Rupee relative to the US Dollar by about 75 percent in 2020-2023. The second one is competitiveness of the fees compared to peer banks and fintech platforms, particularly Meezan Rs. The upper limit of the peer group, 600 ATM minimum, and structural incompatibility of pricing with the flat fee model of NayaPay to digital business payments. The third one is a structural change in behavior that has permanently shifted to fintech platforms and has not been reversed by the macroeconomic recovery, which indicates that the issue is structural and not cyclical.

The report ends with ten strategic recommendations that are Shariah-compliant and focused, a marketing and customer acquisition strategy, a Shariah-compliant alternative to traditional credit card financing, and a 36-month implementation roadmap. These principles are anchored on some of the findings of the customer interviews, data analysis and competition benchmarking and are developed to be put into the context of the Islamic banking and regulatory requirements of Meezan Bank.

Document Type

Restricted Access

Document Name for Citation

Experiential Learning Project

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