The State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) imposed Rs. 1.58 billion in penalties on banks and financial institutions during FY26 for violations of regulatory requirements, but its latest annual financial statement does not identify the institutions fined or detail their individual violations.
Most violations involved foreign exchange regulations, customer due diligence, Know Your Customer (KYC) requirements, anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing rules, and general banking operations.
SBP previously disclosed enforcement actions on a quarterly basis, naming the banks involved, outlining their violations and listing corrective measures.
However, the central bank has discontinued publishing these details on its website, limiting public access to information about regulatory breaches in the banking sector.
The lack of disclosure comes amid persistent complaints about banking services. Customers continue to raise concerns over service quality, while there is no publicly available benchmark comparable to the service-quality framework introduced by the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority for the telecom sector.
Questions also remain over how effectively banks are monitored for overcharging, denying services to customers and other service-related issues.
The absence of a clearly defined public mechanism for assessing service quality has added to concerns about consumer protection.
In FY25, SBP imposed more than Rs. 2 billion in penalties on banks for regulatory violations and compliance failures. Penalties collected by the central bank form part of its income.
Separately, SBP earned more than Rs. 1.9 billion from licensing and operational fees charged to financial institutions in FY26, an increase of around 40% from the previous financial year.
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