KARACHI: For decades, the money Pakistanis abroad sent home travelled one way: into family consumption, a plot, a wedding. The state, chronically short of foreign exchange, wanted that flow to do double duty — to arrive as investment, in dollars the country could hold, through accounts that felt as easy as the banking the diaspora used in Dubai, London or Toronto. The Roshan Digital Account, launched by the State Bank in September 2020, was the doorway: an account a non-resident Pakistani could open entirely online with a Pakistani bank. And the product built to sit inside it — the flagship the whole framework was launched with — was the Naya Pakistan Certificate: a sovereign savings certificate in dollars, pounds, euros and rupees, later joined by Gulf currencies, bought in minutes, paying a published return, and fully repatriable when the holder wants out.
The doorway: Roshan Digital Accounts
An RDA is a bank account with a Pakistani bank, opened remotely by an overseas Pakistani after digital verification, in two broad flavours: a foreign-currency value account for holding and investing foreign currency, and a rupee account for local-currency activity. Through the same login, the holder can pay bills and transfer money in Pakistan, invest in the stock exchange through a linked CDC account, buy property-linked products the banks offer, and purchase government certificates. The certificates are not a bank product pasted into this menu. Naya Pakistan Certificates are issued by the Government of Pakistan under the NPC Rules, 2020 and administered through the State Bank, with the banks acting as the distribution and servicing channel — your counterparty is the sovereign, your shopfront is your bank's app.
Eligibility follows the account: non-resident Pakistanis are the core audience, joined by resident Pakistanis who hold declared foreign assets abroad and maintain the relevant RDA arrangements — a deliberate bridge for documented wealth, consistent with the documentation theme running through Pakistan's recent financial reforms. Everything about the design assumes distance: no branch visits, no paper forms, profit credited to the account, statements online, and repatriation processed through the banking channel rather than negotiated case by case.
Inside the certificate: currencies, tenors, minimums
NPCs are offered in a menu rather than a single form. The currency menu, originally US dollars, British pounds, euros and Pakistani rupees, was extended in 2026 to Saudi riyals and UAE dirhams — an explicit nod to where the largest remittance corridors run. The tenor menu is uniform across currencies: three months, six months, twelve months, three years and five years. Minimum investments are set low enough for household savers — bank-published terms put the entry at 1,000 units of the foreign currency, in multiples of 500 thereafter, and Rs10,000 for rupee certificates in multiples of Rs1,000 — and two families of certificate sit side by side: conventional certificates paying a stated return, and Islamic certificates structured on Mudarabah, in which the holder is the capital provider and a dedicated State Bank-owned company manages the pooled funds in Shariah-compliant assets, sharing the return by a pre-agreed ratio — the same economic destination reached by a religiously distinct road, as with the wider Islamic instruments in our green sukuk guide's family tree.
Profit on shorter tenors is paid at maturity; on the three- and five-year certificates it is paid periodically, half-yearly under the published terms. The certificates are freely repatriable — principal and profit can be sent abroad without the approvals gauntlet that historically haunted foreign-currency investment in Pakistan — premature encashment is permitted on the rules' terms, and the certificates can be pledged as collateral for financing in Pakistan, a feature aimed at the holder whose wealth is in the certificate but whose opportunity is on the ground.
The returns — and why you must date-stamp them
NPC returns are administered rates, set by the government on the State Bank's published table and revised from time to time, with longer tenors paying more than shorter ones within each currency. At launch in 2020, in a world of near-zero dollar interest rates, the dollar certificates' returns were startling enough to headline the product worldwide. They have since been revised repeatedly as global rates rose and Pakistan's own circumstances changed — the State Bank's table in 2026, for instance, showed dollar returns stepping up by tenor into the high single digits and rupee returns materially higher, with the exact schedule varying by currency, the pound and the Gulf currencies each carrying their own schedule, and separate effective dates for different currency revisions.
The discipline this imposes on the reader is the point of this section: any article, video or bank page quoting an NPC rate — this one included — is describing a table that the issuer can and does change for new purchases. The certificate you buy locks the schedule applicable to it under the rules; the certificate you are researching may be priced off a table published after this article was written. Verify on the State Bank's NPC page or your bank's live RDA portal, compare against what the same currency earns in a comparable sovereign instrument elsewhere, and remember that the rupee certificate's higher nominal return carries the exchange-rate question with it: a rupee return earned while the rupee falls can shrink, in the dollars you eventually repatriate, below what the dollar certificate would have paid. Currency choice in NPCs is not a formality; it is the investment decision.
Tax, zakat and the paperwork bargain
The fiscal terms were designed to be memorably simple for a diaspora audience wary of Pakistani tax entanglement. Profit on NPCs carries a withholding tax of 10 per cent, treated as final — the holder is not required to file a Pakistani tax return on account of this income under the scheme's terms — and the certificates are exempt from compulsory zakat deduction. Set beside the general landscape in our guide to foreign currency accounts in Pakistan, the bargain is plain: documented money, a simple final tax, clean repatriation. It is the same exchange the state has offered through several instruments in recent years — certainty and simplicity in return for bringing savings into the recorded system — and for overseas Pakistanis it also settles a practical anxiety: the family's money in Pakistan stops depending on informal channels and personal favours.
NPCs among the diaspora's other choices
The RDA menu invites comparison within itself. Against simply holding foreign currency in the account: the certificate puts idle balances to work at a sovereign return while keeping repatriation — the trade is tenor commitment against yield. Against investing through the RDA into the PSX: shares offer growth, dividends and full market risk, the subject of most of this site; NPCs offer a published return and capital terms set by the rules — they answer different needs in the same household portfolio, and many holders use both. Against National Savings schemes, which resident relatives may urge from habit: National Savings products are for residents in Pakistan, administered in rupees at notified rates; NPCs are the analogous sovereign promise engineered for the non-resident, in the saver's own currency, inside an account built for distance. Against an IPS account: the IPS route buys auction-yield government securities in rupees through a Pakistani bank relationship, a resident's tool rather than a remote diaspora channel.
The risks, stated in proportion
NPCs are sovereign obligations of Pakistan, and their foreign-currency promise is ultimately a claim on the state's foreign-exchange position — the same position whose fragility, in stressed years, produced queues and informal restrictions across the economy even where formal rules promised free repatriation. The scheme's formal repatriability has been a headline commitment since 2020 and central to its credibility; a prudent holder nonetheless understands the difference between a contractual right and the macroeconomic weather in which it might one day be exercised. Add the ordinary risks: premature encashment terms that can trim returns, administered rates for future purchases that move with policy, and — for rupee certificates — currency risk in full. None of this is an argument against the product; it is the argument for sizing it as one component of a diaspora portfolio rather than as the whole of it.
For the overseas Pakistani weighing a first certificate, the working sequence is short: open or use the Roshan Digital Account, read the State Bank's current NPC rate table for your currency, choose tenor against money you will not need early, and keep the account's statements with the family's financial records — heirs abroad, in particular, should never have to discover assets by archaeology. Product terms, eligible banks, rate tables and currency availability evolve by State Bank circular, so confirm the live position before transacting. This article is educational content, not financial advice. As a piece of design, though, the NPC deserves its reputation: it is the moment Pakistan stopped merely asking its diaspora to send money home, and started offering it a proper, documented, repatriable home to arrive in.
Why the state built it: reserves, remittances and trust
The NPC cannot be understood apart from the balance-of-payments anxiety that produced it. Pakistan's foreign reserves have swung, across cycles, between comfort and crisis, and its diaspora's remittances — among the largest inflows the country receives — historically arrived through channels that spent the dollars instantly or, worse, through informal networks that kept them outside the banking system entirely. Roshan Digital Accounts and NPCs were the State Bank's structural answer: make the formal channel so much easier than the informal one that behaviour changes on convenience alone, and give the incoming dollars a reason to stay — a sovereign certificate, in the saver's own currency, that a worker in Riyadh or a nurse in Birmingham could buy from a phone at midnight. The expansion of the currency menu to riyals and dirhams in 2026 shows the same logic still at work: meet the largest corridors in their own currencies rather than asking savers to convert first. Judged as policy, the certificates' success is measured less by any single rate they offered than by whether diaspora savings acquired a documented, repatriable, onshore home — and by that measure, the RDA framework of which NPCs are the flagship remains one of the State Bank's signature reforms of the decade.
One further practical note belongs to families rather than finance: certificates are assets on death, and the RDA's digital records make them discoverable and transferable through the bank's succession process rather than through a search of a Karachi flat. Record the holding — bank, account, certificate tenors — in the same place you record other family assets abroad and at home; the entire design of the product assumes documentation, and an heir who knows the account exists inherits cleanly, while one who does not may never learn what the drawer in Toronto never mentioned.
Key takeaway: Naya Pakistan Certificates are sovereign certificates sold only through Roshan Digital Accounts — multi-currency, three months to five years, conventional or Islamic, with a simple final tax and full repatriation — whose published rates change over time and must always be checked live at the State Bank.
