Why Pakistan Needs a Dedicated Data Infrastructure Layer
Arham Mirkar
Founder, DataLayer
Pakistan has a data problem. Not because data doesn't exist — but because it's inaccessible. Financial records, tax registrations, merchant directories, and bank product catalogs all exist somewhere. But they're scattered across PDFs, Excel spreadsheets, legacy government portals, and social media posts.
The Data Fragmentation Problem
Consider what happens when a Pakistani fintech company wants to show bank card deals to its users. It needs to:
- 1Manually scrape deal pages from 8+ bank websites, each with different HTML structures
- 2Parse PDFs that banks publish as "deal catalogues" — often image-based, not text
- 3Normalize merchant names ("Kababjees" vs "Kababjees Restaurant Clifton")
- 4Deduplicate deals that appear in multiple sources
- 5Keep everything refreshed daily as deals expire and new ones appear
This is months of engineering work. And the fintech company doesn't want to be in the data scraping business — they want to build consumer experiences.
Who Suffers from This?
Banks
Spend millions on apps but have terrible internal data infrastructure. Their card deals and product catalogs are managed in spreadsheets.
Fintechs
JazzCash, Easypaisa, SadaPay, NayaPay — want to show deals and verify taxpayers but building ingestion pipelines is expensive and fragile.
Lending Apps
Need real-time FBR verification for KYC compliance. Currently requires manual portal lookups or integrations that don't scale.
Startups
Can't afford to build data infrastructure from scratch. Need ready-to-integrate data to ship products fast.
What DataLayer Does
DataLayer is Pakistan's first Data-as-a-Service company. We solve this problem by operating as a data infrastructure layer between raw Pakistani data sources and the products that need clean, structured access.
Collect
Raw, unstructured data from public bank websites, government portals (FBR, SECP, SBP), and partner integrations.
Structure
Data is cleaned, normalized, categorized, and deduplicated into consistent, queryable databases.
Serve
Structured data delivered via real-time REST APIs with auth, pagination, filtering, and docs.
The result: companies like CardWise (Pakistan's bank card savings app) can access 15,000+ structured bank deals across 33 cities without building a single ingestion pipeline. They call our API and focus on their product.
The Bigger Picture
Countries like India have companies like Razorpay, Pine Labs, and Setu that built foundational data and payment infrastructure. In Pakistan, this layer simply doesn't exist yet. DataLayer is building it — starting with financial data and expanding to cover the entire Pakistani data ecosystem.
If you're building a product in Pakistanthat needs structured financial, tax, or merchant data — you don't have to build the infrastructure yourself. That's what we do.