Escrow fixed Pakistani brand deals by removing the question of who pays first. The brand's money moves into a local-bank holding account before work starts, the creator can see it is there, and it is released when the agreed deliverable is approved. Neither side has to extend credit to a stranger, which is what used to kill deals before they began.
The problem was never trust. It was sequencing.
Ask a Pakistani creator why a brand deal fell through and you rarely hear "I didn't trust them". You hear a sequencing problem. The brand wanted the post live before releasing budget, because they had been burned by creators who took an advance and vanished. The creator wanted at least half up front, because they had been burned by brands who went quiet the day after the campaign ran. Both positions are reasonable. Together they are a deadlock.
Agencies solved this for large accounts by absorbing the risk themselves — fronting the creator, invoicing the brand, and pricing the float into their margin. That works when the deal is worth lakhs. It does not work for the 30,000-rupee gig that makes up most of the market, which is exactly the segment that stayed stuck on WhatsApp screenshots and half-remembered promises.
What the four-step flow actually does
Escrow replaces the negotiation over who goes first with a neutral third position. The sequence is deliberately boring:
- The brand funds the deal. Money leaves their account and sits in a local-bank escrow account — not in the creator's account, and not in Shaheeno's operating account.
- The creator sees the deal is funded before they start. This is the step that changes behaviour: the work begins because the money is visibly committed, not because someone promised it would be.
- The creator delivers, and the brand has a defined window to review against the brief that was agreed up front.
- On approval, funds release to the creator's payout method — a local bank account, JazzCash or EasyPaisa. If there is a dispute, the money stays put while it is resolved, rather than sitting with whichever party happens to be holding it.
Why local banks matter more than the mechanism
Escrow as a concept is not new, and Pakistani creators have been offered versions of it before by international platforms. Those largely failed here for a reason that has nothing to do with the escrow model: the money took a week to arrive, landed in USD, and lost value twice on the way. A creator quoted 25,000 rupees and received something else.
Holding funds in local banks and paying out in PKR to instruments people already use removes that friction entirely. The creator quotes a number and receives that number. It sounds trivial written down. In practice it is the difference between a payment rail creators will build a business on and one they treat as a novelty.
What it does not fix
Escrow guarantees payment for agreed work. It does not agree the work for you. The disputes that still occur almost always trace back to a brief that said "one Instagram post" without specifying whether that included stories, how long it stays up, or whether the brand can run it as a paid ad afterwards. Escrow will hold the money while you argue about it, which is better than the alternative, but the argument is avoidable.
The brands who see the fewest disputes are the ones who over-specify the deliverable and under-specify the creative. That is also, not coincidentally, the brief format creators most want to apply to.
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