To have any chance of success in business in Pakistan – especially in a sector dominated by large, powerful, and well-entrenched players – one of the most underrated qualities in a startup founder is an understanding of politics. Not politics as in “who will win the next election”. Politics as in “what do people say they want, what do they actually want, and what can I offer them to get them to do what I want.”
Tech investing in Pakistan is having a banner year. Pakistani startups have raised $82 million in just the first half of 2021 according to data from i2i Ventures, a venture capital fund, or only slightly less than the total amount of venture funding for the preceding three years combined. And within that, fintech has a significant share, accounting for approximately $35 million of the total funding raised so far this year. Among those investments is the current record-holder for the largest ever pre-seed fundraising round by a Pakistani startup: the $5.5 million raised by TAG, a neobank.
All of that money has been invested on the basis of a simple premise: that Pakistani finance is about to be transformed over the course of the next decade, and that it will be tech startups that serve as the catalyst for that transformation. One hopes for the sake of those investors that the founders of those Pakistani fintech startups have a clear sense of the politics of the industry they have decided to take the leap into.
This is not a story about who is building what in...
Read Full Story: https://profit.pakistantoday.com.pk/2021/08/15/should-the-fintech-playbook-scare-the-banks/
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