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 05
Cross-border
Inbound and outbound remittance corridors, tourism flows, FX markup on retail cross-border, and the country's posture on stablecoin adoption. Corridor figures come from the World Bank RPW feed or the publishing central bank; both are cited when they disagree.
Remittance inflows
USD · 2024
Surge reflects collapse of parallel-market arbitrage post-March 2024 float; formal-channel flows more than doubled.
Remittance outflows
USD · 2024
Inbound tourism spend
USD · 2024
Outbound tourism spend
USD · 2024
Avg. corridor cost
% · Q4 2024
Net receiver
Top inbound corridors
- Saudi ArabiaUS$9.7B
via MTO
- United Arab EmiratesUS$4.6B
via MTO
- KuwaitUS$3.8B
via MTO
- United StatesUS$2.4B
via bank
- QatarUS$1.9B
via MTO
Top outbound corridors
- SudanUS$0.12B
via MTO
Cross-border card
Card flow leaving and arriving
Cards issued domestically and used abroad reflect outbound consumer travel and cross-border e-commerce; volume acquired from abroad reflects inbound tourism and foreign online shoppers.
Issued volume spent abroad
USD/year · 2024
Constrained by historic FX-allowance rules; post-float liberalisation gradually easing.
Acquired volume from abroad
USD/year · 2024
FX cost
What consumers pay above the interbank
Retail FX markup is the spread between the mid-market rate and the rate the consumer receives — the single largest friction point in small-ticket cross-border.
- FX regime
- managed-float
- Reference
- EGP unified single rate since 6 March 2024; CBE intervenes to smooth excess volatility within an IMF-EFF-monitored framework.
Source · International Monetary Fund
Full reference
Remittances
Net Position: receiver
Source:
Source:
Kpis
Net international reserves
USD · Apr 2026— Rebuild reflects IMF EFF disbursements, GCC bilateral support and the Ras El-Hekma development deal.