Before it’s everywhere, it’s in FWDstart. Subscribe for $99 and save 17% on the first year to stay ahead.
“A lot of households in the country are very asset rich but cash poor.”
For a company founded on the premise that people shouldn’t have to wait until payday to access money they’ve already earned, you’d be forgiven for thinking gold an oddly old-fashioned thing to have become so central to a fintech like Abhi.
But when I recently asked co-founder and CEO Omair Ansari why the company had leaned so heavily into the gold-backed lending business it inherited in Pakistan, that’s exactly where he began.
Across many households in Pakistan and India, gold functions as something of a Swiss Army knife, occupying a space between heirloom and rainy-day fund, accumulated through family gifts and generations. When cash is needed, borrowing against it offers a way to unlock that wealth without forcing a family to part with something whose price can be calculated rather more easily than its value.
“You’re able to really tap into something that people already understood,” Ansari said, pointing next door to India, where an estimated 6.6% of household gold is already used in formal lending, against barely 1% in Pakistan.
🔓 The full version of this article is for paid subscribers only.
Founded in Pakistan in 2021 around earned wage access, Abhi has since expanded into payroll, SME financing and other financial products, while its public story has increasingly travelled westwards, first to the UAE and then into the wider Gulf.
Across its various constituent entities and regulatorily mandated subsidiaries, the wider group has disclosed raising more than $30 million in venture capital and over $200 million in debt, backed by a familiar cast of emerging-market fintech investors including VEF, Speedinvest and Global Ventures.
If you’ve followed Abhi’s exploits from a UAE or Saudi vantage point, that’s probably the company you think you know.
It isn’t, though, the company preparing to go public.
The business heading towards the Pakistan Stock Exchange is ABHI Microfinance Bank, an institution founded in 2008 as Kashf Microfinance Bank, later owned by FINCA and acquired by Abhi and TPL Corp in January 2025. The bank is proposing to issue 132 million new shares, equivalent to exactly 13.65% of the company after the offering.
Those shares buy investors a meaningful slice of the Pakistani bank, but none of Abhi’s UAE or Saudi businesses. That might make the listing sound peripheral to the wider group, but the reality is anything but.
Ansari told me the bank now accounts for roughly four-fifths of all the lending Abhi does globally, while almost 90% of its own loan book is backed by gold.
How did an earned wage access startup end up here? Why has gold become the engine of the business? Why take the bank public now? And what does doing so unlock for an Abhi increasingly looking towards the Gulf?
Over the past few weeks, FWDstart has gone through the bank’s financial statements, draft prospectus, forecasts and IPO research materials, and put those questions directly to Ansari.
What emerges isn’t quite the Abhi most people think they know.
How Abhi ended up owning a bank
Until the acquisition, Abhi’s Pakistani lending sat inside…
Become a paid subscriber today to enjoy unlimited access to FWDstart
To support our journalism, and unlock all of our stories and original analysis about the the MENA startup and VC ecosystem, subscribe below.
