Karachi, November 26, 2019: In order to enhance the dwindle inflows of remittances inflows, the State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) has extended the limit of freelancers on the account of remittances by over three times from $1,500 per month to $5,000 per month.
Freelancers providing computer services and different services can now attract handsome remittances rendering services to their international clients for their big projects.
Pakistan is recognized as one of the biggest contributor in the global freelance market stands at 3 or 4 at major platform of freelance services networks. Some of the major fields include software consultant, content writing, graphic designing, legal transcription, medical transcription and etc.
The contribution of IT remittances in overall IT exports stands over 20 percent whereas freelancers of the other services also attract handsome inflows from different countries making the overall remittances number nearly $1.2 billion per year.
The central bank has come up with different steps in the past particularly to enhance remittances receipts particularly in the field of IT sector. It streamlined various reporting system and mechanism of banking channel to create easiness for professionals of IT sectors.
The fresh move will facilitate the software houses and individual freelancers having capacity to deliver big projects to their international clients however the industry players should also be aggressive to create their own business in different countries to get the benefit from this new relaxation.
On the other hand, the introduction of payment gateway might help the freelancers and IT companies in Pakistan as the alternate of PayPal. The gateway is in the pipeline at present.
Remittances dropped almost 2% to $7.47 billion in the first four months (Jul-Oct) of the current fiscal year 2020 compared to $7.61 billion received in the same period of last year. On the contrary, the government has set a target of receiving workers’ remittances worth $24 billion in FY20 compared to $21.8 billion received in FY19. The central bank has, however, projected the remittances in range of $22.5-23.5 billion in the current year.
