A Pakistani software engineer from Toronto wants to invest $200 in OGDC. A fund manager in Singapore has been following the KSE-100 for two years and is looking for a way to increase his exposure. A Dubai family office, which makes allocations to frontier markets, places Pakistan on its watch list, but has no practical mechanism to act on this belief.
None of them can invest without navigating a maze of foreign currency accounts, fragmented brokerage processes and settlement systems built for a bygone era. This is not a diaspora problem but a demand problem. The capital is there, the interest is there too and the market has earned it. What is missing is a simple way to act.
Over the past three years, Pakistan’s stock market has gradually become one of the best performing in the world. The KSE-100 returned more than 50% last year, and global allocators started paying attention. When a market begins to outperform, curiosity follows. And curiosity always leads to the same question: how to invest in it?
Currently, there is no simple answer. What investors encounter, however, are frictions, layers of operational complexity that turn interest into hesitation and conviction into inaction.
Pakistan’s challenge is often misunderstood. We have 450,000 equity investors in a country of 250 million people. Domestic participation is limited and the 6.9 million Pakistanis living abroad send home more than $38 billion a year, but invest almost nothing in the local stock market. And the growing pool of international investors paying attention also has no clear entry point. Look closely, and these are not three different problems. It is domestic investors who are not participating, overseas Pakistanis are unable to invest and global capital cannot enter. This is a unique three-sided problem. The problem is access.
Pakistan has no investment problem. There is a problem of access, and access determines valuation.
The global context in which this takes place is important. We are experiencing the first stages of the greatest restructuring of financial markets since the creation of the stock market. Larry Fink, whose firm BlackRock manages nearly $150 billion in digital product assets and operates the world’s largest tokenized fund, described it clearly in his 2026 annual letter to shareholders: Tokenization, he writes, is roughly where the Internet was in 1996, and the plumbing of the global financial system is being rebuilt to allow any asset to be held in any wallet, any where.
The numbers behind this thesis are substantial. The global bond market alone is worth $140 trillion. Global equities add another $100 trillion to that amount, and private credit, real estate, commodities and infrastructure expand the addressable universe even further. Simply put, tokenization transforms assets such as stocks, fixed income instruments or real estate into digital units that can be accessed from anywhere.
Compared to this scale, the token share of real-world assets today stands at $30 billion, up 9.6% in the last 30 days alone. BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, Circle, Ondo, Centrifuge. One hundred and sixty-eight platforms are live worldwide across all major asset classes. It’s not a single company or jurisdiction making a speculative bet. We are at the start of the largest capital migration in history, and the direction is not in question.
This is what matters most for markets like Pakistan. Frontier markets don’t trade at a discount simply because of their fundamentals; they trade at a discount because the pool of potential buyers is limited. Limited access restricts participation, and narrow participation suppresses valuation. Access is not a detail; it’s a requirement and, unlike many structural challenges, it’s one of the easiest to solve.
When barriers to access fall, the dynamic changes. The same investor who can buy Apple or Saudi Aramco from a single interface should be able to buy OGDC or HBL with equal ease. When this becomes possible, Pakistani companies no longer compete just for domestic capital but for allocations from a global pool.
The effect is simple: greater access leads to more participants, more participants leads to greater demand discovery, greater demand supports fairer valuations, better valuations lower the cost of capital – and that is how access becomes capital formation.
This is where the opportunity becomes tangible. Instead of asking international investors to navigate local complexity, Pakistan can present itself through simple, globally readable products. For example, a selected basket of top Pakistani companies – an index that represents the country’s growth story. Digital wrappers that enable investors anywhere to gain visibility without rebuilding infrastructure from scratch. It is not about replacing the existing market; this will simply multiply the range exponentially.
It’s not just about overseas Pakistanis looking inward, but also about the world looking at Pakistan and, for the first time, finding a door opening and the diaspora is the natural starting point. Even if a small percentage of overseas Pakistanis allocated some of their capital through accessible instruments, the capital inflows alone would be significant. But that’s just the ground; the real opportunity begins when Pakistan becomes an investment for anyone, anywhere, who wants to make their presence known.
As access improves, the effects worsen. A broader investor base increases liquidity, which then reduces perceived risk, and lower risk attracts more capital. And companies that grow on better-valued capital are building a track record that will spark the next wave of attention. Access and valuation are mutually reinforcing, and markets recognize this early advantage disproportionately.
Other jurisdictions have already moved in this direction. Singapore built a tokenization framework through Project Guardian in less than two years, bringing together large financial institutions to test and deploy new market infrastructure. The United Arab Emirates have done the same within the DIFC.
Pakistan is already making itself noticed on all fronts. The performance is real and interest is growing with greater mind capture on all fronts. The engineer in Toronto, the fund manager in Singapore, the family office in Dubai, they don’t expect a story; they expect easier access.
The Pakistan Stock Exchange has done its job. Sustained performance has put the market on the global map. The next phase is not about proving the opportunity; it’s just about making that opportunity accessible. Because in capital markets, attention does not automatically translate into investment, it is access that converts interest into capital.
And what lies on the other side of this access is not limited to the diaspora sending money home. It is about the integration of Pakistan into the global flow of capital itself.
The writer is the Chairman of the Pakistan Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority (PVARA).
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policies of PK Press Club.tv.
Originally published in The News
