MNT-Halan
US$1.0Bconsumer + SME lending, wallet
Cairo · founded 2018
MNT-Halan
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 07
Fintech & disruption
Egypt's fintech ecosystem is the largest by funded headcount in the Arab world after Saudi Arabia and the UAE. MNT-Halan (consumer + SME lending), Fawry (EGX-listed acquirer + bill aggregator), Paymob (regional acquirer), Valu (BNPL) and Khazna (earned-wage access) anchor the operator set; the FRA's Law 5 of 2022 licensing regime now provides regulatory cover for institutional rounds. The 2024 currency unification reset venture inflows after the 2022–23 trough and CBE's instant-rail tailwind is now feeding a wave of distribution-focused fintechs.
Fintech funding · LTM
US$350M▲ +12% vs May 2024–Apr 2025
USD · May 2025–Apr 2026
Largest unicorn
EGP 8.5B
Fawry (EGX-listed)
Unicorns
Fawry (EGX-listed)
EGP 8.5Bacquirer + bill aggregator
Cairo · founded 2008
Fawry
Funding
Largest disclosed rounds · LTM
Rounds shown are the largest disclosed in the last twelve months. Private markets remain opaque — valuations at follow-on are the most reliable signal of investor conviction.
Round size
- MNT-HalanUS$200M
Strategic primary + secondary · 2023-02-14
Emerging categories
Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL)
growing- Valu (EFG Hermes)
- Sympl
- ContactPay
- MNT-Halan installments
FRA-licensed under Law 5 of 2022; Valu is the scale leader; functions as de facto retail-credit substitute in a high-policy-rate environment.
Stablecoins (informal)
regulated- USDT (informal)
- USDC (informal)
Pre-2024 parallel-market dollar shortage drove substantial retail USDT adoption as an FX hedge; post-unification, official-channel substitution has begun. No formal VASP licensing regime; FRA consultation paper expected H2 2026.
Earned-wage access
emerging- Khazna
- NowPay
Operating under FRA consumer-finance and electronic-money rules; B2B2C distribution via large public-sector employers expanding.
Acquiring & merchant payments (super-acquirer model)
scaling- Paymob
- Geidea
- Fawry
- MNT-Halan acquiring
CBE-licensed payment facilitators consolidating SME and mid-market acquiring; Paymob's regional expansion (KSA, UAE, Pakistan, Oman) makes it the largest MENA-headquartered SaaS acquirer.
- ▌Fawry — bill aggregation embedded in 320,000+ acceptance points
- ▌Paymob — embedded acquiring across MENA SMB stack
- ▌MNT-Halan — embedded credit on its wallet and merchant network
- ▌Valu — BNPL embedded at point of sale (online + offline retail)