Ping Up says AI push aims to widen Pakistan's retail investor base

Ping Up, a Karachi- and London-based wealth aggregator, says it has reached a Rs20 billion cumulative volume target it had set for 2030, four years early, and is now piloting AI agents for banks and asset managers as it tries to widen participation in Pakistan's capital markets. Retail penetration in those markets sits below 1% of GDP, a level the company's founders say has barely moved despite more than a decade of digital wealth apps promising to change it.

Co-founders Wajahat Jafri and Syed Affan Aslam, both from banking backgrounds, told Business Recorder the platform is built around what Jafri called "three pillars: educate, enable, and empower". Aslam was emphatic that Ping Up does not advise: "We treat ourselves as a marketplace, not advisors," he said, adding that although the company holds a licence to advise, the decision remains the customer's. Suitability is handled through an in-app calculator rather than personal recommendation, steering shorter-term investors away from high-risk funds. Revenue comes mainly from a management fee on assets under management, drawn from product partners rather than customers, plus a front-end load on transactions; on the business-to-business side, Ping Up charges development, integration and recurring maintenance fees.

On the institutional side, Aslam said Ping Up is among the "pioneers in AI in the capital market", citing one of Pakistan's largest banks deploying its AI bots across 12,000 branches. The pitch is cost and reach: a bot that works around the clock and removes the need to queue for advice, and an aspiration to help process "about 7% of the overall retail bulk in the country". None of it is live. Asked directly, Aslam said the work is in pilot, targeting launch in "the next three months". He was candid about the limits: "LLMs were never created to do mathematics", so numerical work sits outside generative models, while natural-language output cannot be fully accurate because the models are statistical; he said that if anyone in the world claimed it could be 100% perfect, they must be lying. On liability, he said Ping Up would be held responsible for output where it holds the licence, even though the consumer product is deliberately structured to avoid giving advice — while the AI agents he described are built to replace bank staff who currently "advise people about different sorts of mutual funds".

Ping Up's own figures are modest against the ambition. Gross revenue was roughly Rs100 million last year, with about 12,000 active customers and 40,000 to 50,000 app downloads since launch. Cumulative volume processed stands at Rs20 billion, while current assets under management was cited separately at roughly the same figure — the founders did not present the two as the same measure, and they are not. Gross wealth volume processed in 2026 accounted for Rs8 billion, they said. On funding, a friends-and-family pre-seed round was followed by another round in 2023, and Aslam said nothing has been raised since October 2023; the business has been running profitably and cash flow positively, with whatever it makes reinvested. Valuation moved from $400,000 to $3.2 million within a year of entering the market, and stood at $10 million at the most recent round.

Whether that infrastructure brings new people into the market or simply deepens participation among those already investing is the question the interview leaves open. Aslam said most of Ping Up's customers had never invested in mutual funds, evidenced by fresh account creation at the country's four largest asset managers; the interview did not include independent verification of that data. He said the metric he tracks is whether customers' net worth grows over time, and that Ping Up will be judged on it. Jafri gave a firmer target of close to "half a million" customers by 2030, against roughly 12,000 active today, and framed the gap regionally: India and Bangladesh, he said, have retail penetration in "almost double-digit percentages of their GDP", while Pakistan remains in single digits.