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 06
Fraud & security
Headline fraud totals and typology splits, the rollout of EMV chip, tokenisation, 3DS and biometrics, and the controlling data-protection and payments statutes.
Annual fraud losses
EGP · 2024
Loss rate
basis points on transaction value · 2024
CNP share of fraud
% · 2024
Fraud typology
Where losses come from
Card-not-present dominates every developed-market fraud profile — counterfeit and lost/stolen have both been mechanically suppressed by EMV and tokenisation over the last decade.
Share of card fraud
- Authorised push payment (InstaPay social-engineering)+58%
- Card-not-present (e-commerce)64%
- Account takeover+33%
Authentication
What's deployed on cards today
EMV is the floor; tokenisation removes PAN from merchant systems; 3DS covers the CNP flow; biometric auth drives device-level wallet transactions. Adoption gaps between markets are the clearest signal of fraud-regime maturity.
EMV chip penetration
% · 2024
Tokenised transactions
% · 2024
3DS coverage · CNP
% · 2024
Biometric mobile wallet txns
% · 2024
Consumer protection
- Framework
- CBE Consumer Protection Department under Banking Law 194/2020; FRA consumer protection for non-bank fintech
- Max consumer liability
- EGP 1,000 for unauthorised card transactions
- Liability rules
- Unauthorised card transaction liability capped at EGP 1,000 unless gross negligence is proven; APP fraud reimbursement on a bank-by-bank basis with CBE encouraging voluntary code of conduct adoption — no statutory reimbursement comparable to the UK PSR rules.
Source · Central Bank of Egypt
Security standards
- ▌PCI DSS 4.0 mandated by CBE for acquirers and processors
- ▌3D Secure 2.0 mandatory for e-commerce since 2022
- ▌Mobile wallet biometric authentication required at app level (CBE 2025 circular)
- ▌Data Protection Law 151/2020 with DPC operationalising 2025–26