The State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) imposed Rs. 1.58 billion in penalties on banks and financial institutions in fiscal year 2026 for regulatory violations, but its latest annual financial statement does not name the institutions fined or disclose details of their individual breaches.

The violations mainly involved foreign exchange rules, customer verification requirements, Know Your Customer (KYC) procedures, anti-money laundering regulations, counter-terrorism financing requirements and general banking operations.

Previously, the central bank published quarterly enforcement reports identifying the banks penalized, describing their violations and outlining the corrective measures required. However, the SBP has stopped publishing these details on its website, reducing public access to information about regulatory breaches in the banking sector.

The limited disclosure comes as customers continue to raise complaints about banking services and service quality. Unlike the telecom sector, where the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority has introduced a service-quality framework, banking customers do not have a comparable publicly available benchmark for assessing service standards.

Questions also persist over the monitoring of banks for excessive charges, denial of services and other customer-related issues. The absence of a clearly defined public framework for measuring service quality adds to concerns about consumer protection and accountability.

In fiscal year 2025, the SBP imposed more than Rs. 2 billion in penalties on banks for regulatory breaches and compliance failures. The fines collected by the central bank contribute to its income.

Separately, the SBP earned more than Rs. 1.9 billion from licensing and operational fees charged to financial institutions in FY26. This represented an increase of around 40 percent from the previous fiscal year.