Pakistan’s digital banking ecosystem has reached a significant milestone with Garaj enabling the launch of Raqami Islamic Digital Bank, the country’s first fully Islamic digital retail bank operating entirely on domestic cloud infrastructure. The development reflects growing confidence in locally hosted enterprise grade cloud environments to support highly regulated financial institutions while meeting strict compliance, security and performance standards required by the banking sector.
Raqami Islamic Digital Bank’s complete technology stack, from core banking systems to production workloads and disaster recovery environments, is hosted on Garaj’s Tier III certified cloud infrastructure within Pakistan. By deploying all mission critical banking operations on a domestic cloud platform, the bank is operating within a secure and resilient architecture designed to meet the availability and redundancy benchmarks associated with Tier III facilities. This approach ensures that key banking services remain continuously accessible to customers while maintaining strong controls around data sovereignty, governance and regulatory compliance. The deployment covers not only live transactional systems but also backup and disaster recovery mechanisms, ensuring operational continuity in the event of infrastructure disruptions or unforeseen incidents.
The implementation demonstrates how cloud infrastructure tailored for regulated industries can support digital only banking models at scale. Running core banking operations on Garaj’s cloud environment allows Raqami Islamic Digital Bank to manage customer onboarding, account services, payments and other retail banking functions through a fully digital framework without relying on foreign hosted data centers. The use of a domestically managed cloud platform aligns with evolving regulatory expectations around local data hosting and reinforces trust among stakeholders who prioritize transparency, security and jurisdictional oversight. By combining production and disaster recovery capabilities within the same certified ecosystem, the bank benefits from synchronized failover readiness and structured resilience planning designed to meet financial sector requirements.
Garaj’s role in powering this infrastructure signals the expanding maturity of Pakistan’s cloud services market, particularly in supporting high value sectors such as banking and fintech. Tier III certification reflects adherence to stringent standards for redundancy, uptime and system reliability, enabling institutions like Raqami Islamic Digital Bank to operate with confidence in a cloud native environment. The successful rollout establishes a new benchmark for cloud powered banking within Pakistan by demonstrating that domestic infrastructure can deliver the scalability, compliance alignment and operational stability required for digital retail banking at a national level. As financial institutions increasingly explore technology driven service models, this deployment underscores the practical viability of locally hosted cloud solutions in supporting secure, resilient and regulation ready digital banking operations across the country.
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