ABA Editorial · Aug 30, 2025 · 12 min read
MNT-Halan has lent USD 12 billion since inception. InstaPay is processing mobile wallet transactions at a 72 percent year on year growth rate. The Central Bank of Egypt is on the verge of issuing its first full digital banking licenses. Inside Egypt's fintech market, where the super-app model is actually working, and why Gulf capital is quietly rewriting the capital stack.
Egypt sometimes gets left out of the conversation about African fintech because its regional context is different. Cairo's natural market extends into the Gulf and across the Mediterranean as much as it extends into the rest of the continent. But Egypt's fintech ecosystem in 2026 is one of the most mature on the continent, one of the most profitable at the top of the pyramid, and structurally one of the most interesting. It has produced Africa's largest super-app-meets-lender in MNT-Halan, built a central-bank-run instant payment network that now processes billions of dollars a month, and is about to issue its first full digital banking licenses. This is a market report on where Egyptian fintech stands in 2026 and what makes the Cairo ecosystem different from Lagos, Nairobi, or Cape Town.
Egypt's first unicorn, MNT-Halan, is the clearest example of what a fully-scaled African fintech can look like when it commits early to lending rather than payments. The company was founded in 2017 as a ride-sharing and delivery app (the name Halan means "now" in Egyptian Arabic), pivoted under an injection of capital from Dutch microfinance specialist MNT Investments, and became a lender first and everything else second. In 2023, Chimera Abu Dhabi bought a 20 percent stake for USD 200 million, valuing MNT-Halan at more than USD 1 billion and making it one of only three Egyptian tech companies ever to cross the billion-dollar threshold.
The scale figures, as of mid 2025, are significant. MNT-Halan held a gross loan book of over USD 700 million in Egypt alone, larger than most conventional Egyptian commercial banks, according to an interview the company CEO Mounir Nakhla gave to AGBI in June 2025. Across all operations, including the Turkey subsidiary and smaller operations in the UAE and Pakistan, the group gross loan book reached USD 1.3 billion. Since inception, MNT-Halan has disbursed over USD 12 billion in loans, with 54 percent of that going to women and 41 percent to people aged under 35. In 2024 alone, the company lent more than USD 2.2 billion.
The company generates approximately 59 percent of its income in Egypt, 40 percent in Turkey, and the remainder in its UAE and Pakistan operations, according to the same interview. In July 2024, MNT-Halan secured USD 157.5 million in fresh funding from a syndicate including the International Finance Corporation, Development Partners International, Lorax Capital Partners, Apis Partners, Lunate, and GB Corp. The most recent corporate bond issuance received an investment grade BBB+ rating, which is noteworthy for any African company and exceptional for an African fintech.
MNT-Halan's product set is a textbook super-app: micro, SME, and consumer lending; buy-now-pay-later; digital payments and wallets; pre-paid cards; savings and investment products; and an e-commerce platform for home appliances and FMCG. The CEO told AGBI the lending-first strategy was deliberate: "Unlike many digital finance entrants who started with payments, MNT-Halan began with lending, a technically complex business." In a market where 25 percent of Egyptians lack a bank account and smartphone penetration is approaching 65 percent, lending into the underbanked segment is where the economics work.
If MNT-Halan is the super-app story, Paymob is the infrastructure story. Founded in 2015 and headquartered in Cairo, Paymob operates the leading payment gateway in the Middle East and North Africa region, supporting more than 50 payment methods including major international cards, regional BNPL platforms such as Tabby and Tamara, and a variety of mobile wallets. In September 2024, Paymob closed a USD 72 million Series B round, bringing its total funding to USD 90 million and confirming its position as Egypt's second most well-funded fintech after MNT-Halan. The round was aimed at scaling Paymob's expansion into Saudi Arabia and the UAE while reinforcing its market lead in Egypt.
Paymob is the company that made MENA-wide merchant acquiring practical for African businesses. The platform's breadth of supported payment methods, a function of years of integration work with local banks and wallet operators, is the technical moat. Replicating it from scratch would take any competitor years.
Khazna, founded in 2019 and focused on earned wage access and lending for low- to middle-income Egyptian workers, secured USD 16 million in pre-Series B funding in February 2025, bringing total funding to over USD 63 million. The round is specifically earmarked for two things: applying for a full digital banking license from the Central Bank of Egypt, and expanding into Saudi Arabia, where the Egypt-Saudi remittance corridor represents one of the largest diaspora payment flows in the world.
The digital banking license ambition is meaningful. The Central Bank of Egypt laid out its regulatory framework for fully-fledged digital banks in July 2024, and Khazna is targeting mid 2026 to receive its license. If approved, Khazna would become one of the first genuine digital-only banks in Egypt, alongside whichever incumbents choose to convert subsidiaries to the new framework. Khazna reports more than 500,000 customers as of early 2025. CEO Omar Saleh told TechCrunch in February 2025 that the company broke even the prior month, which is a significant milestone given how many African lending fintechs burn cash for years.
Khazna's Saudi strategy is worth paying attention to. Unlike Gulf BNPL players like Tabby and Tamara that focus on short-term credit, Khazna is targeting medium-term earned wage access, payroll-backed lending, and pension-based credit. Roughly three million Egyptians live in Saudi Arabia, and the Egypt-Saudi remittance corridor is one of the largest in the world, which means a Saudi-Egypt cross-border product line is a natural extension rather than a speculative market entry.
The Egyptian state plays a bigger direct role in fintech infrastructure than most other African countries. The Central Bank of Egypt launched the Instant Payment Network (IPN) in March 2022, linking all Egyptian banks through an interoperability system that enables integration with licensed fintechs. On top of the IPN, the CBE launched InstaPay, a smartphone application that allows direct payment transfers between users' bank accounts or the state-backed Meeza payment card.
InstaPay is scaling fast. In the second quarter of 2025, the value of Egyptian mobile wallet transactions reached EGP 943 billion (approximately USD 19.8 billion), a 72 percent year on year increase, according to data cited in an AGBI special report published in November 2025. Mordor Intelligence forecasts the Egyptian mobile payments market will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 16.76 percent between 2025 and 2030, reaching USD 184.3 billion. In June 2024, InstaPay added QR code payments. In November 2024, the CBE announced InstaPay would begin accepting inbound Gulf remittances starting January 2025, processing them directly into recipient bank accounts in real time. For a country where remittances from Gulf workers are a major source of household income, that single capability is economically significant.
According to the CBE, 48.1 million Egyptians held some form of transaction account in the first half of 2024, including bank accounts, Egypt Post accounts, mobile wallets, and prepaid cards. In a country of approximately 109 million people, that is a substantial and still-growing base of financial access.
The most distinctive feature of Egyptian fintech capital structure in 2025 is the dominance of Gulf and MENA investors. Where South African fintechs raise from European and US funds, and Nigerian fintechs raise from a mix of US and global emerging-market funds, Egyptian fintechs increasingly raise from Gulf sovereign wealth funds, Saudi banks, and UAE private investment companies. Chimera Abu Dhabi's USD 200 million MNT-Halan stake is one example. Khazna's February 2025 round included Aljazira Capital (the investment arm of Bank Aljazira of Saudi Arabia), anb Seed Fund (managed by anb Capital), and SANAD Fund for MSME. This is a structurally different capital stack than other African fintech hubs.
The Gulf capital pipeline matters for two reasons. First, it provides genuine regional depth, not just one-off checks. Egyptian fintechs with Gulf backers tend to end up with Gulf expansion strategies within two to three years, because the investor relationships naturally pull that direction. Second, Gulf capital tends to be more patient than US venture capital, which is relevant in a market where the path to profitability is longer than the typical US venture fund hold period. MNT-Halan's BBB+ investment grade bond rating would not exist in a market dominated by shorter-horizon capital.
Egypt has two primary fintech regulators: the Central Bank of Egypt, which oversees banks and payment institutions, and the Financial Regulatory Authority (FRA), which oversees non-banking financial services including microfinance, consumer finance, insurance, and capital markets. The CBE's Financial Inclusion Strategy for 2022 to 2025 and the FRA's Strategy for Developing the Non-Banking Financial Sector for 2023 to 2027 have been the two framing documents for the current wave of fintech activity.
The regulatory posture is pro-innovation. MNT-Halan holds micro, consumer, and nano finance licenses from the FRA, and was the first Egyptian company to obtain an independent electronic wallet license directly from the CBE. The 2023 digital banking framework, followed by the July 2024 detailed guidelines, opened the door for fully-fledged digital banks, which Khazna is pursuing. The CBE's ongoing work on electronic Know Your Customer (E-KYC) infrastructure, launched in the first half of 2025, reduces onboarding friction for any licensed fintech operating in the country.
Three developments to track in Egyptian fintech through 2026. First, the CBE's processing of Khazna's digital banking license application and the timing of the first full digital bank going live. If Khazna hits its mid 2026 target, expect at least two or three other Egyptian fintechs to follow within twelve months. Second, whether the Gulf capital pipeline continues to deepen or whether the Gulf sovereign funds rotate toward Saudi-origin deals at the expense of Egyptian ones. Third, the trajectory of fintech funding volumes. First half 2024 saw Egyptian fintech funding drop 87 percent to USD 39 million from USD 291 million in 2023, driven by the absence of large-scale deals comparable to the MNT-Halan USD 260 million round that year. Whether 2026 sees a return to the 2023 pace, or whether Egyptian fintech settles into a steadier mid-sized deal flow, will tell us whether the Cairo ecosystem is maturing or stalling.
In a sector increasingly defined by who can combine local licenses, patient capital, and disciplined execution, Egypt in 2026 looks strong on all three. MNT-Halan alone is a case study in how that combination produces outcomes that look unusual in the African context and almost ordinary when judged against Brazilian or Indonesian peers. The direction is clear. What remains uncertain is the pace.
This report draws on interviews and analysis published by AGBI including "How MNT-Halan became one of Egypt's biggest lenders" (June 2025) and the CIB Egypt Special Report "How Egypt's fintechs are shaking up banking" (November 2025); Fintechnews Middle East reporting on the top Egyptian fintechs (April 2025); TechCrunch coverage of Khazna's USD 16 million round (February 2025); The Digital Banker reporting on MNT-Halan's USD 157.5 million round (July 2024); Central Bank of Egypt and Financial Regulatory Authority public communications on the Financial Inclusion Strategy and digital banking framework; and the ICLG Fintech Laws and Regulations Report 2025-2026 Egypt chapter.