aik by BankIslami today launched aik Connect, the country’s first Shariah-compliant Open Banking and Banking-as-a-Service gateway. The platform does away with the old way of onboarding partners, which typically meant weeks of back-and-forth between legal, business and technical teams. Now it happens through one self-serve digital flow.
Here’s how it works in practice: a fintech, merchant or aggregator signs up on the portal, fills in their company details, signs their NDA digitally right there in the same session, and gets scoped API access once approved. No email chains. No waiting on someone in a back office to provision access manually. Once they’re in, partners have a full catalogue of Shariah-compliant APIs to build with, covering digital account opening, QR payments, fund transfers, instant Raast transfers, bill payments, and balance and transaction inquiries. These are the same capabilities that would normally take months of negotiation and separate integration work to piece together.
“This isn’t just a feature release, it’s a shift in how partners experience aik,” said Ashfaque Ahmed, Chief Officer of aik by BankIslami. Ashfaque Ahmed added, “What used to take days of coordination now happens in minutes. It’s a direct step toward our vision of aik Connect becoming the go-to Open Banking gateway for banks, fintechs and merchants across Pakistan.”
Kashif Ali, Chief Product Officer of aik by BankIslami, commented, “We built aik Connect around one question — how fast can we get a partner from interest to a working integration? Once you frame it that way, you start stripping out every bit of friction that’s slowed Open Banking down in this market.” He added, “Shariah compliance wasn’t bolted on afterward. Every API, every workflow, was designed to meet that standard from the start. Partners shouldn’t have to choose between moving fast and staying compliant, and with this platform, they don’t have to.”
aik Connect’s APIs sit directly on the State Bank of Pakistan’s Raast rail, so every partner that plugs in adds to a more connected, instant-payments ecosystem for the whole country. Making that connectivity self-serve, and Shariah-compliant from the ground up, lines up with two things SBP has been pushing for at a national level, quicker adoption of Open Banking, and parity for Islamic finance institutions when it comes to digital infrastructure. When onboarding stops being a bottleneck, more fintechs, merchants and even government entities can work within formal banking rails instead of finding workarounds outside them.
This launch holds a greater signifance. Instead of every bank, fintech and merchant negotiating one-off integrations, aik Connect gives Pakistan’s financial sector something to build on collectively — a shared foundation that other industries, from digital lending to government disbursements, can tap into rather than recreate from scratch. It’s less about aik offering APIs and more about aik becoming the infrastructure other financial products get built on top of.
Speed hasn’t come at the expense of security. Every connection into aik Connect is encrypted, and access credentials are managed under strict, bank-grade controls. aik’s security team regularly tests the platform for vulnerabilities and puts it through real-world attack simulations, with safeguards in place to block suspicious or excessive access attempts. Every partner is verified and approved before they can go live, and all data moving through the platform is protected end-to-end. The system is monitored around the clock and follows established international security standards for banking and open APIs, so partners can move fast without compromising on trust.
With aik Connect, aik by BankIslami is doubling down on its commitment to open, trusted digital infrastructure for Pakistan’s financial sector, in line with BankIslami’s broader mission of Saving Humanity from Riba through ethical, accessible and technology-driven Shariah-compliant financial solutions.
