By Malik Abbas, Founder & CEO, CoinConnect
Somewhere in almost every first conversation, a client asks me the most natural question in the world: "Can you guarantee we'll get the license?"
My answer is always the same, and it never changes no matter how much I want the deal: No. I can't, and I won't.
I know how that sounds. You're about to commit serious money and months of work, you want certainty, and here's the firm you're considering telling you it can't promise the one thing you most want to hear. Your instinct might be to find someone who will promise it. I want to spend this article convincing you of the opposite — that my refusal to guarantee your approval is the single most reassuring thing I can tell you, and that a firm which guarantees it is the one you should run from. By the end, you'll understand that the "no" is not a weakness in my offer. It's the strongest evidence that you can trust everything else I say.
Why The Question Is Completely Understandable
Let me start by validating the question, because it comes from a real and rational fear. You're not asking for a guarantee because you're naive. You're asking because the stakes are enormous and the downside is brutal.
If your application fails, you don't just lose a fee. You lose months. You lose the opportunity cost of capital that was committed and tied up. You potentially lose your board's confidence in the whole Pakistan plan. And in a first-mover market, you lose ground to a competitor who got it right. The fear behind "can you guarantee it?" is really the fear of that — of pouring everything in and walking away with nothing. It's a completely legitimate fear, and any honest advisor should take it seriously rather than dismiss it.
So I don't dismiss it. I address it directly — just not with a promise I can't keep. Because the right response to a real fear is not a comforting lie; it's a credible plan to make the feared outcome unlikely. Let me explain why a guarantee can't be that plan.
Why No One Can Honestly Guarantee It
The reason is structural, and it's simple: PVARA is an independent statutory authority that makes its own decisions. No consultant, no law firm, no advisor sits inside the regulator's decision-making. We don't approve your application — PVARA does. Anyone outside PVARA who "guarantees" you a license is promising to control a decision that, by law, they do not control.
Think about what would have to be true for a genuine guarantee to exist. Either the firm has some way of forcing or pre-arranging the regulator's decision — which we'll come to, and which is catastrophic — or they're simply asserting control they don't have, which is a lie. There is no honest third option. A regulator that could be guaranteed in advance by an outside firm wouldn't be an independent regulator at all, and PVARA, built to FATF standards in a market determined to protect its standing, is very much an independent regulator.
So when you hear "we guarantee approval," the first thing to understand is that it cannot be literally true in the honest sense. Which means it's one of two things — and both should alarm you.
What A "Guarantee" Actually Means — Two Possibilities, Both Bad
When a firm guarantees your PVARA approval, there are exactly two explanations, and you should be afraid of both.
The first possibility: they're lying to win your business. They've calculated that "guaranteed approval" is what closes the deal, so they say it, take your money, and deal with reality later — either by quietly walking back the promise when problems arise, or by hoping it works out and disappearing if it doesn't. This is the more common case, and it tells you something devastating about the firm: they are willing to lie to you about the most important thing, before you've even signed. A firm that opens the relationship with a comforting falsehood is not a firm that will tell you hard truths when you need them.
The second possibility is worse: they're hinting at a back-channel. If a firm genuinely believes it can deliver your approval, it may be implying it has some improper influence — a relationship, an arrangement, a "way of making it happen." In a FATF-aligned regime with serious anti-corruption exposure, this is not a shortcut; it is a catastrophe waiting to detonate. A back-channel is a single point of failure that can vanish overnight, it exposes you and your Key Individuals to criminal and fit-and-proper consequences across multiple jurisdictions, and it can poison your banking and your reputation permanently. The "guarantee" that sounds reassuring may be the most dangerous sentence anyone says to you in this entire process.
So the choice a guarantee presents you is: a liar, or a corruption risk. There is no good version. The honest firm is the one that tells you it can't guarantee — because honesty is the only position that isn't one of those two.
The Tell: Overpromising On The Uncontrollable Predicts Cutting Corners On The Controllable
Here's a principle I'd ask you to carry into every vendor conversation, in any industry: the firm that overpromises on the thing it cannot control is the firm that will cut corners on the things it can.
A firm willing to guarantee a regulator's decision — something genuinely outside its power — has already shown you its relationship with the truth. If it will stretch reality on the biggest, most checkable claim, what do you think it does with the smaller claims you can't easily verify? The capital figures? The timeline? The completeness of the application? The strength of the AML build? The honesty about banking? A firm that lies to win the deal lies throughout the deal. The guarantee isn't an isolated overpromise; it's a window into how the firm operates.
Conversely, a firm that holds the line on the one thing it can't promise — even when promising it would win the business — is demonstrating exactly the integrity you need in a partner handling your regulatory, capital, and reputational risk. The "no" is a credential. It tells you this is a firm that values being right over being agreeable, which is precisely the firm you want building something this consequential.
What We Guarantee Instead
Refusing to guarantee approval is not refusing to commit. It's committing to the right things — the things we actually control. Here is what I will guarantee you, and mean it:
I guarantee that we control everything except the regulator's signature. The strategy, the route, the category and capital structuring, the compliance build, the application's quality, the banking path, the launch — all of that is ours to own and get right, and we do.
I guarantee that we will never let you file anything we haven't first tried our absolute hardest to get rejected ourselves. That's the Zero-Objection Protocol: before your application goes to PVARA, our own panel attacks it across AML, structure, fit-and-proper, custody, and capital, and we don't file until they can't break it. We fail it in private so the regulator can't fail it in public.
And I guarantee that we will make you the applicant PVARA has no rational reason to refuse — complete, compliant, attack-tested, and credible.
That is the honest version of certainty. It's the difference between hoping you won't be rejected and engineering an application that's built not to be. We can't promise the outcome of an independent decision; we can engineer the highest achievable probability of a clean, fast approval, and we stake our reputation on doing exactly that. A guarantee is a promise about someone else's decision. What we offer is a promise about our own work — which is the only kind of promise worth anything.
Why Our Refusal Should Increase Your Confidence
Let me make the logic explicit, because it's counterintuitive and it matters.
When a firm tells you "we guarantee it," your confidence should fall, because you now know they're either lying or implying corruption. When a firm tells you "we can't guarantee it, and here's exactly what we can and will do instead," your confidence should rise, because you've just learned three things: that they tell you the truth even when it costs them; that they understand the regime well enough to know the regulator is genuinely independent; and that they're confident enough in their actual work to win you on substance rather than on a false promise.
The honest "no" is a filter. It screens out the firms that win on comfortable lies and leaves you evaluating firms on what actually matters — the quality of their preparation, their process, their experience, their track record. A firm that won't lie to you about approval is a firm you can trust to tell you the truth about your timeline, your capital, your weaknesses, and your real chances. That trust is worth infinitely more than a guarantee that was never real.
The Client Who Only Signs On A Guarantee Is A Client Who Will Blame You
There's a harder truth underneath all this, and I'll say it plainly because it's part of why we hold the line.
A client who will only sign if you guarantee approval is, almost by definition, a client who will blame you when the regulator does something outside your control. They've been told a falsehood and built their expectations on it; when reality intervenes, the relationship turns adversarial. The honest framing protects both sides: it sets expectations on what we actually control, so that when we deliver a clean, attack-tested, fully-prepared application, you judge us on the work — which is the right standard — rather than on a promise no one could keep.
This is also why, occasionally, we lose a prospect to a firm that did guarantee it. I've made my peace with that. A client who chooses the firm that lied to them is a client who was always going to be a problem, and the firm that "won" them has taken on a liability, not a victory. I would rather lose that deal than win it dishonestly and inherit the fallout. If you've been offered a guarantee elsewhere, I'd gently suggest that what you were really offered was a future dispute.
How This Honesty Shows Up Everywhere Else
The refusal to guarantee approval isn't an isolated principle — it's how we operate across the board, and you'll see it everywhere if you look. We label the draft VASP Regulations as draft, and tell you capital figures are confirmed at filing, rather than presenting them as settled fact. We give you realistic timelines (roughly 3–6 months to Sandbox entry, 9–15 months to a full license) rather than the fantasy speeds some firms quote to win deals. We tell you when banking is conditional and case-by-case rather than promising an account. We correct our own materials when the regulations change rather than letting stale claims stand.
That consistency is the point. The same honesty that makes me say "no" to the guarantee question is the honesty that makes every other number and claim we give you trustworthy. You can't have one without the other. A firm's integrity is a single thing, and the guarantee question is simply the clearest place to see it.
The Honest Limit — Owned, Not Hidden
This entire article is, in a sense, the honest limit of what we do — stated openly rather than buried. We cannot promise PVARA's signature. We can promise everything that leads up to it: the right strategy, real compliance, an attack-tested application, secured banking, a managed review, and a ready launch. We make the feared outcome — rejection — as unlikely as it can possibly be made by anyone, and we're completely transparent that "as unlikely as possible" is not the same as "impossible." That transparency is not a hedge. It's the foundation of a relationship you can actually rely on.
How To Test Any Firm: Ask If They Guarantee Approval
If you take one practical test from this article into your conversations with any potential partner — us included — make it this one. Ask directly:
"Can you guarantee we'll get the PVARA license?"
The right answer is no — delivered without hesitation, and immediately followed by a clear explanation of what they can control and how they maximise your probability of approval. That answer tells you the firm is honest and understands the regime. If instead you hear "yes, we guarantee it," you've learned everything you need to know: walk away, because you're talking to either a liar or a corruption risk, and neither is fit to handle your entry.
CoinConnect will never guarantee your approval, because we won't lie to you and we won't go near a back-channel. What we'll do is control everything except the signature, attack your application before the regulator can, and make you the applicant they have no reason to refuse — and we'll tell you the truth at every step, including the parts you'd rather not hear. In a decision this consequential, that honesty isn't a limitation. It's the most valuable thing we offer.
If you'd like a straight, no-spin read on your actual chances and exactly how we'd maximise them, that's precisely the conversation we have with every serious client — and it costs you nothing.
Book a free scoping call: calendly.com/abbasmalikmuntazir/30min
WhatsApp: +92-329-9552299 · Telegram: @Abbas1101 · Email: team@coinconnect.site
Keep reading: The True Cost of Delay — What Every Month Without a PVARA License Costs Your Business (Article 17).