Pakistan Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority (PVARA) Chairman Bilal Bin Saqib has said that artificial intelligence and tokenisation can become the developing world’s most powerful engines of financial inclusion, stressing the need to make them accessible to those excluded from traditional financial systems.
Speaking at the Social Business, Youth and Technology Forum during the 81st Session of the United Nations General Assembly, Saqib delivered a keynote on the choice now facing emerging economies as the rules of global finance are rewritten.
The address placed Pakistan’s own journey within a wider story. Worldwide, an estimated 1.3 billion adults remain without an account at any financial institution, while close to 900 million of them already own a mobile phone.
The gap, the keynote argued, was no longer one of technology but of rails and of rules, and of the willingness to build them.
The forum brought together a high-level opening panel that included Dr Khalilur Rahman, President of the 81st UN General Assembly; José Ramos-Horta, President of Timor-Leste and Nobel Peace Laureate; Dasho Tshering Tobgay, Prime Minister of Bhutan; Minister Wellington Dias of Brazil; and Nobel Peace Laureate Professor Muhammad Yunus, whose pioneering work on microcredit the forum was convened to honour.
Pakistan was presented as one proof that the choice can be made. In 2018, the country closed its banking system to digital assets.
With the passage of the Virtual Assets Act 2026, that door was reopened under a clear regulatory framework, followed by the establishment of a regulatory sandbox and the launch of licensing regulations for virtual asset service providers.
Independent global adoption indices place the number of Pakistani virtual asset users at more than 40 million, among the largest and youngest user bases in the world.
“For too long, the Global South has been on the menu. Pakistan has chosen the table, with our own pen, writing our own destiny,” said Saqib. “We do not want to be takers of this technology. We want to be makers of it. Technology alone includes no one. Regulation alone includes no one. Inclusion happens where the two meet.”
The keynote closed on the generation the forum was designed to serve, calling on young innovators across the developing world to build without waiting, and framing the goals of zero poverty and zero unemployment not as distant aspirations but as objectives that today’s tools make possible to design.
