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 03
Rails & infrastructure
The instant rail, the RTGS spine, the card switch, the direct-debit scheme, and the country's CBDC stance. Each rail is reported with operator, launch year, and 2024 flow so the relative scale across rails is readable at a glance.
CBDC status is deliberately granular: live, pilot, preparation, live stalled, and sceptical, no pilot are different things.
CBE has flagged CBDC research within the National Payments Strategy but has not committed to a pilot. Public posture emphasises that InstaPay and Meeza already deliver most of the retail-payments objectives a CBDC would address. The framing is consistent with the SCHEMA-v3 'research' value rather than 'pilot'.
Instant payments
Instant Payment Network
The instant leg typically carries the vast majority of retail consumer flow in modern payment systems — and sits in direct tension with card networks and wallets for the same transactions.
- Operator
- Egyptian Banks Company under CBE oversight
- Live since
- 2022-03-01
Transactions · 2024
transactions/year · 2024
Q1 2025 ran at 263m transactions, suggesting a 1.0–1.2bn quarterly trajectory through 2025.
Cleared value · 2024
EGP/year · 2024
Participating institutions
institutions · 2025
Alias registrations
aliases · Jun 2025
Rail features
- ▌Real-time account-to-account clearing 24/7
- ▌Fee schedule 0.1% of value (min EGP 0.5, max EGP 20) from April 2025
- ▌Per-transaction cap raised to EGP 100,000 for KYC-verified users (April 2026)
- ▌Daily EGP 120k / monthly EGP 400k limits at standard tier
- ▌Interoperable with Meeza wallets and cards
RTGS
Real-time gross settlement
The RTGS spine clears high-value interbank flow — including the settlement of the instant-rail cycles and card-network net positions. Transaction count is modest; cleared value is enormous.
Transactions · 2024
transactions/year · 2024
Cleared value · 2024
EGP/year · 2024
Open banking
Regulatory and technical posture
- Regime
- CBE Open Banking Framework (in rollout)
- Live Since
- 2024-09-01
Licensed open-banking participants
institutions · Q1 2026
Full reference
Kpis
Egyptian Banks Company (EBC) participants
institutions · 2025— EBC is the CBE-owned national switch operator; runs Meeza issuance and clearing alongside IPN.
Q1 2025 IPN cleared transactions
transactions/quarter · Q1 2025
AFAQ regional instant settlement participants
institutions · 2025— Egypt is a founding participant; Buna-operated multi-currency settlement layer for Arab regional instant payments.