The government has met a long-standing demand from freelancers by allowing them to transfer remittances through the international gateway — PayPal.
Dr. Umar Saif, Caretaker Federal Minister for Information Technology and Telecommunications, announced this while speaking with the press.
The minister stated that the ministry plans to launch many digital initiatives next week, including the channelization of remittances through PayPal, in order to make Pakistan a ‘Tech Destination’. Currently, no financial mechanism exists to facilitate payments.
The minister announced that PayPal will not be coming to Pakistan. Instead, he brokered a deal to route remittances from PayPal through a third party. He noted that the formal launch ceremony in this regard is scheduled for January 11.
The minister, while highlighting the government’s initiatives to bolster exports of the IT and telecom sector, stated that the sector’s official export is currently $2.6 billion, but the actual figure is around $5 billion as the industry parks a major portion outside the country to pay salaries of their international employees placed with foreign clients and incur monthly expenses for cloud hosting, marketing, and sales on platforms like Google, Amazon, and LinkedIn.
“We worked with the SIFC and the State Bank to make a big policy intervention, allowing IT companies to keep 50 percent of their export revenue in dollars in an account in Pakistan and make their international expenses without any restrictions from this amount,” the minister said. He also stated that IT businesses are beginning to return their dollars home, and our export earnings increased by 13 percent in one month.
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