State Bank of Pakistan Launches Survey to Improve EasyData Portal

The State Bank of Pakistan wants to know if its flagship data portal is actually working for the people who use it.

SBP has opened a user survey for the EasyData Portal, its online repository of historical and current economic and financial data, asking users to share feedback on the platform’s features, functionality, and overall experience. The bank says the responses will help identify gaps and shape future improvements to the interface.

What EasyData Actually Is

EasyData was launched in June 2022 by then-Acting Governor Dr. Murtaza Syed, who described it at the time as a step toward making the central bank more transparent and accountable. Building it wasn’t quick. SBP has said the portal took roughly two and a half years to develop before it went live, and it launched as what the bank called the largest unified dataset in Pakistan, covering nearly 8,000 variables across more than 90 datasets spanning monetary, external, real-sector, debt, and interest-rate data.

The portal pulls together information compiled directly by SBP alongside selected datasets from the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics and other official sources, giving researchers, journalists, students, and policymakers a single place to pull verified numbers from instead of chasing them across scattered reports and PDFs. Some series run remarkably far back. The exchange rate data for the rupee against the US dollar stretches to 1957, the year the central bank was established, and remittance figures are available from 1972 onward, though not every dataset has that kind of depth. Kibor data, for instance, only goes back to 2008, and interest rate series begin in July 2015. The portal is open to anyone who signs up with an email address, with no cost or access restrictions, and it’s now maintained by SBP’s Statistics & Data Services Department.

Why a Survey, Why Now

SBP hasn’t detailed what specifically prompted this particular review, and the announcement doesn’t reference any known technical issue or complaint pattern. The framing is straightforward: the bank says it wants to understand how users are actually experiencing the portal more than three years after launch and to use that feedback to guide functionality and usability improvements going forward. For a resource that was pitched at launch as a long-term transparency initiative rather than a one-off release, a structured user survey years later reads as routine product maintenance rather than damage control.

Why This Matters Beyond the Survey Itself

A data portal is only as useful as the people who can actually find what they’re looking for in it. For a resource like EasyData, which sits underneath a meaningful share of Pakistan’s public economic analysis, journalism, and academic research, small friction points, confusing dataset labeling, weak search, and unclear indicator definitions can quietly push researchers back toward disconnected reports or less reliable secondary sources, undermining the exact transparency goal the portal was built around.

If SBP follows through on what the survey turns up, the payoff isn’t a cosmetic redesign. It’s a stronger version of one of the only centralized, freely accessible sources of long-run economic data in Pakistan, at a moment when reliable, up-to-date figures on inflation, external accounts, and debt carry more weight in public debate than they have in years. Whether this becomes a real product update or a feedback exercise that quietly closes without visible change will say a lot about how seriously the central bank is treating its own transparency mandate three years after making it the headline reason for building EasyData in the first place.