Middle East · GDP rank #38
Egypt
EG · EGP @ 0.0189/USD
Egypt is the Arab world's most populous economy and the region's clearest case of payments digitisation forced from above. Vodafone Cash leads a mobile-money market with 46m active wallets; Meeza, the state-backed national card scheme, sits on roughly 55% of cards in issue and is the default rail for government salary, pension and welfare disbursement; InstaPay, the CBE-operated instant rail, crossed 1.5bn cumulative transactions in 2024 and ran at ~263m transactions in Q1 2025 alone. The March 2024 float of the pound under the IMF programme redrew every cross-border line on the page and pulled remittance inflows back through formal channels.
Tab 02
Consumer payments
How consumers actually pay: the share of cash, the stock and flow of cards, the scheme split at checkout, which mobile wallets matter, and how broadly POS acceptance reaches.
Every figure is authored against a named publisher — click the ⓘ anywhere to open the source panel with the underlying URL and access date.
Cash share of POS volume
% · 2024
Debit card share
% · 2024
Meeza prepaid and debit dominate; co-badged Visa/Mastercard debit is meaningful only in upper-income segments.
Credit card share
% · 2024
Penetration structurally low; CBE policy rate held above 24% through most of 2024–25 makes revolving credit punishing.
Mobile wallet share
% · 2024
Payment mix
At the point of sale
The shares below are POS volume (count of transactions), which reads differently from POS value. For the value-share read, see the card-economy grid underneath.
Share of POS
- Cash64%
- Credit card4%
- Debit card16%
- Instant / A2A8%
- Mobile wallet7%
- BNPL~5%
- Other1%
Cash behaviour
- ATM network
- 23,800
- Avg. ATM withdrawal
- EGP 2,400
- Cash share · value
- 38%
- Cash share · volume
- 64%
Source · Central Bank of Egypt
Scheme share
Which networks clear the card volume
Scheme share is the split of general-purpose card purchase volume — not issuance, not count of cards. A high domestic share (e.g. UnionPay, RuPay, ELO) means a large share of card flow never touches a global scheme.
Domestic scheme operated by Egyptian Banks Company (CBE-owned); ~40m cards in circulation, dominated by prepaid and debit issuance to government-salaried workers, pensioners and welfare recipients.
Share of card volume
- Visa26%
- Mastercard17%
- Amex2%
- Other<1%
- Domestic Scheme55%
Debit / Meeza card transactions
transactions/year · 2024
Debit / Meeza transaction value
EGP/year · 2024
Credit card transactions
transactions/year · 2024
Credit card transaction value
EGP/year · 2024
Average Meeza ticket size
EGP · 2024
Average credit ticket size
EGP · 2024
Mobile wallets
Where wallets actually land
User counts are the best single scalar for wallet reach, but they understate usage intensity in markets where one super-app carries multi-digit trillions of renminbi or rupees. For flow, see the rails tab.
Active users
- Vodafone Cash25.5M
Q1 2026
- e& Cash (formerly Etisalat Cash)9.7M
Q2 2025
- Orange Cash8.8M
Q2 2025
- InstaPay16M
Jun 2025
Notable wallets
Vodafone Cash
Vodafone Egypt
e& Cash (formerly Etisalat Cash)
Daily News Egypt
Orange Cash
Daily News Egypt
InstaPay
Business Tech News
Full reference
Kpis
POS terminals (Egypt)
terminals · 2024— Meeza QR is the interoperable domestic standard since 2021; covers wallet, card and InstaPay acceptance.
Mobile wallet transaction value (Q2 2025)
EGP/quarter · Q2 2025
Vodafone Cash share of wallet transaction value
% · Q2 2025