Search for the Roshan Digital Account and almost everything you find is a bank marketing page for one bank. There is no comparison, which is odd, because the choice of bank is the only decision the applicant actually makes — the State Bank sets the rest.
That framing is the wrong way round, and it produces the wrong question. The useful question is not "which bank is best" but "which parts of this are fixed by regulation and which parts are the bank's own choice". Once you separate the two, the comparison becomes short, and most of what the marketing pages emphasise turns out to be identical across every provider.
The short answer
The Roshan Digital Account is a remotely-opened bank account for Pakistanis abroad, established under a State Bank framework in September 2020. It comes in two forms, and the distinction between them decides what you can do with the money:
- FCVA — Foreign Currency Value Account. Holds foreign currency. Gives access to foreign-currency Naya Pakistan Certificates and foreign-currency term deposits.
- NRVA — Non-Resident Rupee Value Account. Holds rupees. Gives access to rupee certificates, rupee deposits, and Pakistan Stock Exchange equities through Roshan Equity Investment.
Eligibility runs wider than the name suggests. Non-resident Pakistani nationals, Pakistan Origin Card holders and other non-resident foreign nationals of Pakistani origin, government employees posted abroad, and resident Pakistanis who have declared foreign assets to the FBR are all covered — the last group on restricted terms set out below.
Balances are repatriable abroad without prior State Bank approval. Profit on Naya Pakistan Certificates carries 10% withholding tax as a full and final discharge, with no requirement to be on the active taxpayer list.
By end-July 2026 the scheme had taken US$13.647 billion in cumulative inflows across 956,790 accounts.
The mechanism: what the State Bank fixes, and what the bank chooses
Everything in the first column below is common to every participating bank, because it is written into the framework rather than into a product sheet. Everything in the second is the bank's own.
| Set by the State Bank framework | Set by the individual bank |
|---|---|
| The two account types, FCVA and NRVA | Which currencies it actually offers within each |
| Remote onboarding for non-residents | The onboarding portal, document list and turnaround |
| Free repatriation without prior approval | The exchange rate applied on conversion |
| Naya Pakistan Certificate terms and rates | Whether it offers the Islamic certificate as well |
| 10% final withholding tax on certificate profit | Schedule of charges on everything else |
| Eligibility categories | Whether it supports equities, property and pension products |
This is why bank-to-bank comparison of the headline product is unproductive. The certificate rates are sovereign rates: they are identical at HBL, Bank AL Habib, MCB and everywhere else, because the Government of Pakistan is the issuer and the bank is a distribution channel. Any page implying otherwise is describing the same rate card.
The differences that survive are the ones below.
Currency menu
The State Bank permits a wide list. Banks offer a subset. Allied Bank and HabibMetro both publish PKR, USD, GBP, EUR, SAR and AED. Meezan Bank offers all six on the current-account side but narrows to PKR, USD, GBP and EUR on the Mudarabah savings side — a distinction worth catching before you open, because a Gulf-based applicant who wants a profit-bearing dirham account will not find one there. Bank Alfalah presents its range as PKR and foreign-currency variants of both current and savings accounts rather than enumerating currencies on the landing page.
The Islamic question
This is not a cosmetic label. Conventional Naya Pakistan Certificates pay a contracted rate. Islamic Naya Pakistan Certificates are structured on Mudarabah, so the return is a share of actual monthly financials rather than a promise, and the indicative rates are published alongside actual realised rates. Meezan Bank offers the Islamic route only. HBL, Allied Bank and Bank Alfalah run parallel conventional and Islamic propositions.
The market has voted more heavily than the coverage suggests. At end-July 2026, balances stood at US$684 million in conventional Naya Pakistan Certificates against US$1,316 million in the Islamic version — close to two to one in favour of the Islamic instrument.
Equity and property access
Roshan Equity Investment, the route into the Pakistan Stock Exchange, runs through a Central Depository Company sub-account and is attached to the rupee account, not the foreign-currency one. HBL, Allied Bank, Bank Alfalah and Meezan Bank all support it. Total balances in it were US$151 million at end-July 2026 — small beside the certificates, which tells you what the scheme is actually being used for.
Property and vehicle financing (Roshan Apna Ghar, Roshan Apni Car) and pension products vary by bank and are the clearest genuine differentiator, since a bank without the product cannot arrange it for you.
Simplified variants
Allied Bank operates a Low-Income RDA with lighter documentation and a US$5,000 monthly remittance ceiling; Bank Alfalah runs Asaan current and savings variants on the same logic. If your monthly transfers are modest, the simplified account is faster to open. If they are not, the ceiling is a trap you will hit later.
Fees and the exchange rate
The published position on account maintenance is consistent and favourable: Allied Bank states no initial or minimum balance requirement, and Meezan Bank states no service charges, no minimum balance, and a free debit card on first issue once the rupee account has been funded. Turnaround at both is quoted at 48 hours from complete documentation.
Beyond that, resist any table of numbers — including one on this page. Charges live in each bank's schedule of charges, which is revised periodically and is the document a bank's own RDA page links to rather than reproduces. More importantly, the largest cost in the whole arrangement is usually invisible in any fee schedule: the exchange rate applied when your foreign currency is converted into rupees. That spread is a bank-level commercial decision, it is not published as a fee, and on a large transfer it will dwarf every line item that is. The only way to compare it is to ask two banks for the rate they would apply on the same day, on the same amount.
The worked example: the certificate rate card
Since the rates are sovereign and therefore identical across banks, one table covers every provider. These are the Naya Pakistan Certificate rates effective 1 June 2026, as published by HBL and Bank AL Habib.
| Tenor | PKR | USD | GBP | EUR | SAR | AED |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 3 months | 11.75% | 6.75% | 6.75% | 4.75% | 6.50% | 6.50% |
| 6 months | 12.00% | 7.00% | 7.25% | 5.25% | 6.75% | 6.75% |
| 12 months | 12.25% | 7.25% | 7.50% | 5.50% | 7.00% | 7.00% |
| 3 years | 12.50% | 7.50% | 7.75% | 6.00% | 7.25% | 7.25% |
| 5 years | 12.75% | 7.75% | 8.00% | 6.25% | 7.50% | 7.50% |
Minimum investment is US$1,000 in increments of US$500 for the foreign currencies, and Rs10,000 in increments of Rs1,000 for rupees. Encashment before three months pays no profit at all; after that, early encashment is paid at the rate for the nearest shorter tenor.
Read the two columns at either end against each other. The rupee certificate pays roughly five percentage points more than the dollar certificate at every tenor. That gap is not free money — it is the market price of the risk that the rupee depreciates against the dollar over the holding period, and the mechanics of what drives that are set out in how remittances move the exchange rate. An investor choosing the rupee certificate is taking a currency position, whether or not they think of it that way.
Nothing here is investment advice. These certificates carry Pakistani sovereign credit risk, the equity route carries market risk, and a return earned in rupees is earned in a currency that can lose value against the one you actually spend.
The misconception: "residents cannot open one"
The name says overseas Pakistanis, every marketing page says non-resident, and the near-universal conclusion — repeated in guides, forums and the reference literature — is that anyone living in Pakistan is excluded. That is wrong, and the exception is specific enough to be worth stating precisely.
A resident individual Pakistani who has duly declared assets held abroad, in the wealth statement of their latest tax return filed with the FBR, is eligible. HabibMetro publishes this as one of three eligibility categories alongside non-resident Pakistanis and non-resident foreign nationals; Allied Bank lists it too.
Three restrictions come with it, and they are what make the rule coherent rather than a loophole:
- FCVA only. The resident category may open the foreign-currency account. It cannot open the Non-Resident Rupee Value Account — the name is doing literal work.
- No digital onboarding. The remote account opening that defines the scheme is not available to this category. The applicant must attend a designated branch in person. HabibMetro, for instance, restricts this to designated branches in Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad.
- The declaration is the qualification. Eligibility rests on assets already declared to the FBR. The account is a channel for money the tax authority has already been told about, not a route for money it has not.
Follow the first restriction through and a practical conclusion falls out that no bank page states directly: because Pakistan Stock Exchange access runs through the rupee account, and the resident category cannot open one, a resident with declared foreign assets can buy Naya Pakistan Certificates through the scheme but cannot buy Pakistani equities through it.
The mirror-image error deserves equal billing. None of this makes the RDA generally available to people living in Pakistan. A resident without declared foreign assets is not eligible, and an applicant who obtains an account by declaring non-residence they do not have has made a false declaration to a bank and to the tax authority in a product built on FATCA-compliant identity checks. The rule is narrow. It is simply not the blanket "no" that the coverage reports.
What to watch
- The State Bank's participating-bank list. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs page still names the eight-bank launch cohort. Banks not on that list — Allied Bank, Bank AL Habib, HabibMetro, Bank of Punjab, JS Bank among them — plainly offer the product now. Take the current list from the State Bank's own RDA pages, not from any secondary summary, this one included.
- The monthly RDA inflow release. July 2026 brought US$282 million, down from US$306 million in June and US$312 million in May, but up about 52% on the US$185 million recorded in July 2025. The monthly series is noisy; the year-on-year comparison is the one that carries information.
- The certificate rate card, and its issue date. Rates are revised. Any table without an effective date on it — including this one, once it ages — should be treated as historical.
- The split between conventional and Islamic certificate balances. The Islamic instrument holding roughly twice the conventional balance is the most under-reported fact about this scheme, and it has direct implications for how the government structures future foreign-currency issuance.
- Repatriation flows against gross inflows. Cumulative inflow is the number that gets announced. What matters for the external account is the net position after repatriation, for the reason set out in the complete guide to remittances to Pakistan: certificate money is closer to portfolio investment than to remittance income, and it behaves accordingly when returns disappoint.
Naya Pakistan Certificates are, from the state's side of the transaction, external debt — they appear in the external creditor mix decomposed in Pakistan's public debt, decomposed. The diaspora investor and the sovereign borrower are on opposite ends of the same instrument, and it is worth knowing which end you are holding.