SBP Core Banking Network Goes Live as Cisco Data Centre Switches On in Karachi
The State Bank of Pakistan has switched on a new SBP core banking network and a software-defined data centre built by Cisco, replacing part of the technology that sits underneath almost every digital payment in the country. The project was marked complete at the central bank’s head office in Karachi on Friday, 6 November 2026, with the State Bank governor, the top United States diplomat in Pakistan and Cisco’s Pakistan chief in attendance.
The deployment is a multimillion-dollar contract awarded to the American technology company, presented as a commercial partnership between the United States and Pakistan, not a routine systems upgrade. No exact figure has been published. The State Bank describes the new setup as a secure, resilient software-defined data centre architecture, built to strengthen data protection, give the bank more operational flexibility and keep digital banking services running reliably nationwide.
What the new SBP core banking network does
A central bank’s core network is the plumbing that every other financial service in Pakistan runs on. It clears interbank payments, settles transactions and carries the systems that commercial banks connect to. The SBP core banking network replaces that plumbing with a software-defined data centre — an architecture in which networking, storage and computing are managed through software rather than fixed hardware, so capacity can shift and faults can be worked around faster than on older hardware.
According to the State Bank, the upgraded system is designed to improve data protection, increase operational flexibility and ensure reliable digital banking services nationwide. Protection comes first — a central bank holds the country’s payment records — then flexibility, then reliability.
The project was carried out by Cisco Systems Pakistan. US Chargé d’Affaires Natalie Baker joined State Bank Governor Jameel Ahmad and Cisco Pakistan Country General Manager Kashif Ul-Haque at the Karachi head office to mark the completion. Baker called the infrastructure “a national asset that underpins economic stability and public confidence”. Governor Ahmad and Ul-Haque both praised the teams behind the implementation, according to The Boardroom PK.
The State Bank is no stranger to core banking overhauls. It adopted the Temenos core banking system in 2002 — a first for Pakistan — upgraded it in 2015, and put in place PRISM, its real-time settlement system, in 2008. In November 2024 it signed a separate agreement with Systems Limited and Temenos to modernise the platform again with a Temenos Payment Hub built around the SWIFT ISO 20022 standard. The Cisco deployment is the network and data centre layer underneath that software story.
A US–Pakistan commercial deal, not just a tech upgrade
The commercial framing of this project is explicit, and it is part of the story. This is a multimillion-dollar contract awarded to an American company, presented as a US–Pakistan commercial partnership. That matters beyond the technology, because Pakistan’s relationship with Washington has for years been weighted toward security and aid rather than contracts. As The AZB reported, the Karachi event was framed throughout as a celebration of the technology partnership, not merely a handover — a signal that the relationship now has a commercial strand worth showing off.
Why the timing matters for digital payments
The new network arrives as digital payments in Pakistan are growing fast. Raast, the State Bank’s instant payment system, launched in 2021 on the ISO 20022 standard and has moved a large volume of transactions onto rails that did not exist five years ago. In a single recent quarter it processed 646 million transactions. Cheque-era infrastructure does not carry that load indefinitely, and the central bank’s systems must keep pace with the banks and fintechs connecting to them.
The remittance connection is the most direct one. Remittances are expected to reach $45 billion this fiscal year, and they arrive electronically in very large volumes. The cost and reliability of moving that money depends on exactly this kind of infrastructure: the SBP core banking network, the data centre and the settlement systems behind them. A faster, cheaper formal channel also competes with hawala, the informal transfer system that has long been the standing problem in Pakistani remittance policy.
The bank is managing a tight external position at the same time. Total liquid foreign exchange reserves stand at about $26.75 billion, and Pakistan needs $21.5 billion in external financing this year. Saudi Arabia has rolled over $3 billion, as confirmed by Finance Minister Muhammad Aurangzeb and covered in our report on the Saudi rollover. A dependable core banking system is the machinery that has to keep working while the country manages its external account, and our latest figures show SBP’s reserves rising to $21.56 billion for a third straight week.
What is still not known
For all the ceremony, several basic facts have not been published. No figure has been given for the contract value beyond “multimillion-dollar”, and no performance benchmark has been set out — no uptime target, no transaction throughput figure, no latency commitment against which the new system can later be judged. The project timeline has not been published either, and it has not been stated whether commercial banks must make any changes to connect to the new SBP core banking network.
That matters, because announcements of banking infrastructure in Pakistan have a long record of outrunning delivery. A launch ceremony is not a performance record. This deployment will be judged on uptime rather than on the attendance list — on whether Raast payments keep clearing when transaction volumes spike. As The Pakistan Daily noted, those are the tests that will decide whether the investment was worth it.
For now, what is confirmed is narrow but real: a new SBP core banking network and software-defined data centre, built by Cisco, switched on at the State Bank’s Karachi head office, with the governor, the US Chargé d’Affaires and Cisco’s Pakistan chief present. Everything beyond that — price, performance, timetable — remains unpublished, and any claim about those figures would be speculation.
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