Pakistan gears up for conducting business deals online

App being launched that will allow electronic signing of agreements

KARACHI: Pakistan’s economy is rapidly becoming digitalised with digital payment and online documentation preparation systems being adopted by businesses of all sizes and types.

The latest inclusion is expected to be an app of Paksign, which will enable people to get business deals done by electronically signing documents, save time and increase ease of doing business.

“The app will be more beneficial to businesses and firms situated at distant locations, especially across cities or countries,” Paksign Co-founder Mubariz Siddiqui told The Express Tribune.

The app will facilitate the signing of business-to-business agreements related to partnership, supply, confidentiality, power of attorney, car sales, tenancy and employment. Later, it will serve and provide benefits for the general public as well.



“The signature and other information in documents (like names of signatories) will be verified online in real time by the National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA),” he said.

It takes days or even weeks if the process is initiated through the conventional system of mailing documents between two sides across cities or countries.

“The app will reduce the time of executing business deals from days and weeks to a few minutes,” said Siddiqui, who is also a corporate lawyer.

The Electronic Transaction Ordinance 2002 has legalised the signing of documents electronically, which prompted the tech start-up to initiate work on the project.

“We have already acquired a licence to provide such (digital signing) services in Pakistan,” Siddiqui said.

Siddiqui has teamed up with two other professionals, Altaf Quraishi and M Sohaib Saleem, for working on the app. Quraishi is a corporate lawyer while Saleem teaches law at the Institute of Business Administration (IBA) Karachi.

The team previously developed a website (wukla.com), which offers online preparation of documents and delivers them at the doorsteps of clients. It has won Habib Bank Limited’s (HBL) documentation business as well.

It is doing online documentation for HBL Islamic banking division’s human resources department and easypaisa merchants.



Paksign, groomed at technology incubator The Nest I/O, is in a different league altogether in terms of facilitating customers, according to Siddiqui. While wukla.com allows the preparation and delivery of documents, Paksign covers every aspect of a deal from document preparation to signing and submission.

“People just need to enter basic information about them (such as names and addresses) to create documents (like a car sale agreement) since other legal jargon related to specific fields in the documents is already available on the app,” he added while elaborating on its functionality.

“The launch of the app will enable Telenor Microfinance Bank (formerly Tameer Bank) to register 2,000 easypaisa merchants per month compared to the current 120-130 per month,” he said.

The registration of such merchants is the key to the success of digital payments system as speedy registration will make the system much more effective.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 29^th, 2017.

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