Client Name

HBL

Faculty Advisor

Dr. Usman Nazir

SBS Thought Leadership Areas

Entrepreneurship and Innovation

SBS Thought Leadership Area Justification

This project is centered on creating a disruptive, digital-first sub-brand designed to bridge a distinct structural gap in Pakistan's financial ecosystem. It moves away from traditional, product-led retail banking and introduces an innovative financial service model tailored specifically for digital natives

The Freemium Business Model: Innovation is deeply embedded in the product architecture through a Freemium Model. The base tier leverages zero-paperwork onboarding (using just a selfie and CNIC) to eliminate traditional banking friction, while advanced monetization relies on active users opting into value-driven premium tiers (Hive Plus).

Targeting the Gig Economy: The project specifically accounts for the Freelance Entrepreneur persona. Recognizing that traditional banking creates massive friction for young freelancers, the product design innovates by integrating cross-border payment solutions tailored to help independent creators easily receive overseas income.

Lean Market Entry Strategy: The Go-To-Market (GTM) strategy relies on an agile, staged rollout—beginning with a lean beta phase of 500–1,000 users on select university campuses to test app stability and early loop retention before scaling nationally at a fraction of the cost of physical branch networks.

Aligned SDGs

GOAL 8: Decent Work and Economic Growth

Aligned SDGs Justification

This project fosters economic growth by designing an infrastructure that integrates young demographics into the formal financial sector, specifically supporting new digital career paths 

Empowering the Gig Economy: The research identifies a critical segment: the Freelance Entrepreneur. Traditional banking setups in Pakistan present structural barriers and long processing times for receiving foreign revenue. By proposing built-in overseas payment integrations tailored for young professionals in urban and Tier-2 hubs like Peshawar and Sialkot, HBL Hive acts as an economic catalyst, allowing digital workers to seamlessly participate in the global economy

Transitioning from Informal to Formal Finance: The report highlights that youth currently handle money heavily through informal social channels (splitting costs, pooling funds). By formalizing these behaviors natively inside a secure app through automated features like group expense pools and digital bill splitting, the project shifts informal capital loops into the regulated banking system.

Encouraging Youth Savings Culture: Through automated "round-up" rules and goal-oriented digital "Savings Jars" (e.g., for education or small-scale assets), the proposal actively builds healthy financial habits and long-term capital accumulation among university students and early career starters.

NDA

No

Abstract

This research aims to understand the banking preference, needs and behavior of youth age group between 18 to 30 years in Pakistan and to suggest a digital-first youth proposition to Habib Bank Limited (HBL). This particular group is the force behind the financial services of the next generation in Pakistan, catalysed by the increasing adoption of mobile internet, ubiquitous smartphone penetration and the rapid adoption of transactional applications. While they are very digital and active on social media, these young consumers are under-served by traditional, legacy-based financial institutions that are rigid. The goal of this experiential learning project (ELP) is to translate and understand the relationship between young adults and corporate and distributed financial services, identify explicit structural friction points that lead to brand switch and uncover functional and emotional motivations that influence loyalty. To answer these questions in a systematic way, the project is structured around a comprehensive mixed-methods research framework which combines primary quantitative data, advanced persona-based simulation modelling, qualitative focus groups, intensive in-depth interviews, macro-economic secondary data triangulation and an extensive competitive audit of local fintech networks and global neobanking systems. A total of 236 high intent, organic answers were collected initially through digital campus outreach, niche social communities, and hyper-targeted online ads. The quantitative core was supplemented with an additional 236 high fidelity simulated data points from predictive socio-economic persona profiling, to correct a severe, localized geographic bias that was strongly favoring urban students in the university. This structured data underwent extensive consistency testing (Cramér's V), logical testing (no behavioral contradiction), and structural testing (Chi-Square) to validate the "Strategic Skew" to match one of the representative national demographic profiles. Twenty semi-structured in-depth interviews and four lengthy focus groups were conducted, on which the qualitative data was overlayed on this quantitative base, in order to map peer-to-peer social dynamics, lifestyle spending triggers and trust thresholds among corporate professionals and students. The results of the study show that there is a clear hierarchy of behavioral preference for the 18- 30 age group: for this group, instant convenience is most important, followed by institutional trust, interface simplicity, and practical, tangible rewards or lifestyle benefits. Young users are highly in favor of the smooth onboarding process, visual appeal, and conversational style of agile fintech apps for small, frequent P2P payments, but they are deeply wary of having these entities handle long-term savings or larger sums of money because of their frequent account freezes, volatile regulations, and lack of physical fallbacks. On the other hand, this generation sees traditional corporate banking designs as slow, bureaucratic, and extremely punitive due to excessive paperwork, the need to visit branches, manual signature checks, and the time it takes to process transactions. The data highlights how banking is no longer seen as a simple, stand-alone service by the next generation, but as a lifestyle tool that is integrated and seamlessly embedded in their social and economic worlds. 5 From these setups, this report offers a blueprint of a credible, strategy-led youth sub-brand for HBL, that is going to unite the best of HBL’s institutional credibility and infrastructure with the most mobile user experience of a modern neobank. HBL Hive follows a lean scalable Freemium Model, enabling users to register with CNIC and a selfie within minutes, introduces virtual debit cards, free instant transfers through phone numbers, and round up saving jars that automatically round up savings and transfer the balance to your savings account. Active monetisation happens through a "value-packed premium tier", Hive Plus, which features targeted cashback rewards and international lounge benefits with co-branded discounts in high-frequency consumer areas such as food delivery, ride-hailing, e-commerce and digital entertainment. The report details the process of Go-To-Market (GTM) sequence, operational risks, forecasting financials to the expected break-even point of month 28-30 and establishing key performance indicators to ensure a successful transition of HBL into the main financial system for a growing number of youth in Pakistan.

Document Type

Restricted Access

Document Name for Citation

Experiential Learning Project

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