National financial integration can best be evaluated through the progress of two principal processes: the share of the SME sector (the dominant national business employer) in national credit, and the distributional balance of bank credit across regions/provinces of the country. Both these processes, never robust in Pakistan, have lost even more steam in recent years. SME credit has fallen to under 7% of total bank credit, and no province/region outside Punjab and Sindh uses more than 9% of their own deposit base for lending within their domain.