MCB’s digital channels were never only a retail story. The same platform and switching infrastructure that ran a 600K+ user mobile bank also carried the bank’s corporate and business banking franchise — and I owned the digital channels and the payment products that sat on top of them.
The standout was a product that didn’t exist anywhere else in the country: Pakistan’s first SME credit card. But the card was one piece of a wider build — business-banking channels, merchant services, and high-volume payment rails, owned end to end.
Corporate & Business Banking Digital Channels
I owned MCB’s corporate and business banking digital channels and core business-account servicing — account management, expense control, and invoicing — giving the bank’s business customers self-service over the accounts and cash positions they’d previously had to manage at a branch. Business banking is where digital maturity usually lags retail; treating these channels as a product in their own right, rather than a servicing afterthought, was a deliberate choice.
Pakistan’s First SME Credit Card
The hardest problem in SME lending is collateral. SMEs make up roughly 90% of Pakistan’s new enterprises and around 40% of GDP, yet they received only a small fraction of total credit — most couldn’t post the security a conventional bank loan demands.
We closed that gap with a card instead of a loan: collateral-free working capital, delivered on rails the bank could control. Every product decision was, underneath, a risk decision.
The card only worked at partner-vendor POS — launched at Metro cash-and-carry — so credit could only be spent on business inventory, not diverted. The constraint was the control that made collateral-free credit possible.
No e-commerce or open-retail use; PIN, a cardholder photo printed on the card itself, and identity and signature verification at the POS — appropriate for a facility carrying limits up to PKR 5M.
We launched into HORECA — hotels, restaurants, caterers — first, where perishable inventory drives a fast cash-flow cycle, faster repayment, and lower default risk. Prove the model on the right segment, then widen.
A monthly-utilisation / monthly-settlement model with a 22-day interest-free window. The bank earned on a fixed return per transaction at the acceptance side rather than on consumer interest.
"Close-loop acceptance wasn’t a limitation. It was the control that let the bank extend collateral-free credit at all."
The programme cleared three years of R&D and two years of regulatory approval before it launched — and went to market without heavy above-the-line spend, relying on targeted orientation at the point of acceptance rather than mass advertising.
Merchant Services & Bulk Payment Rails
Alongside the card, I ran MCB’s SME card and merchant-services programmes — including prepaid issuance for payroll and disbursement — and delivered the bank’s bulk and batch payment flows. That meant the high-volume rails business customers actually run on: payroll, supplier, and disbursement runs, plus collections and bulk-transfer processing.
These are the unglamorous flows that decide whether a business banks with you. They have to be correct, reconcilable, and predictable at volume — and they are where operational risk concentrates.
What It Looked Like
Illustrative concept screens, in MCB’s brand direction, showing how the three threads came together for a business customer — the dashboard and accounts, the SME Card, and a payroll run.
Mobile app — scoped to view only. A high-level dashboard for balances, card utilisation, and run status; authorisation was completed on the web portal.
Web portal — the primary interface for corporate and business banking. Payments, bulk runs, and approvals were initiated and authorised here.
A note on these screens
These are illustrative concept screens, not the production interface. The branding shown is a default — the portal supported client co-branding, so corporate and business customers could adapt the look and feel to their own identity.
Why It Matters
Most payments PMs are either a retail-issuing story or an acquiring story. This was both, on the business-banking side — credit-program design, acceptance and risk controls, merchant services, and high-volume disbursement rails, owned end to end.
Questions worth asking
- Is your SME credit product priced on risk you can actually control, or on collateral your customers can’t post?
- Where does acceptance design quietly carry your risk strategy — and does anyone own that link?
- Which customer segment’s cash-flow cycle should prove a new credit product before you scale it everywhere?
- Are your corporate digital channels a servicing afterthought, or a product in their own right?
Retail growth gets the headline. The business-banking side — SME credit, merchant services, and the rails that move payroll and supplier payments — is where a bank’s commercial relationships are actually won. That is the work this case study is about.