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For years, Egyptian companies have been paying salaries in cash, and people have been saving money outside banks.  Only 10 percent of Egyptians have bank accounts, according to Payfort’s State of Payments in the Arab World 2014 report. Over the previous decade, the electronic payment market has been penetrated by two firms: state-owned e-Finance, which handles electronic payments from and to the government through banking channels, and private-sector Fawry, which was launched in 2008 to provide payment solutions through ATM machines, mobile wallets, and retail points. Chief technology officer of Fawry, Mostafa Elnahhas, told Wamda that his company succeeded in spreading 65,000 collection points in 300 cities for banked customers in Egypt. However, the electronic payment is still small-sized due to the large amount of unbanked customers and the low credit card penetration.

Regulations are, however, crippling entrepreneurs. Mourad Alashry, CEO of PayMe, launched his startup in August 2016. It  allows companies and businesses to collect electronic payment without signing contracts with banks or paying extra fees.  The startup offers a simple payment tool for companies to allow them to set up an account and have customers send money through it. PayMe app was forced by Egypt’s fiscal regulator to stop operating for four months to abide by regulations. (Photo via PayMe) However, shortly after its launch, the Central Bank of Egypt, the state regulator, suspended Payme’s operations as a payment firm as it wasn’t cooperating with a bank. The firm had to abide by this regulation until it followed the requirements and collaborated with state-owned bank the National Bank of Egypt, then resumed its business in January 2017.  

Regulations are, however, crippling entrepreneurs. Mourad Alashry, CEO of PayMe, launched his startup in August 2016. It  allows companies and businesses to collect electronic payment without signing contracts with banks or paying extra fees.  The startup offers a simple payment tool for companies to allow them to set up an account and have customers send money through it.

1. Millennials squared – a parable of a digital wallet and beer moneyEarlier this year Sam Crowder stood up at a televised baseball game, and held a sign asking his Mum to send him “beer money”. He included his Venmo account information. Thousands of people sent him money, as his sign went viral. Beyond sharing this story as advice in case you ́re ever thirsty and leave your wallet at home, what it reflects is how the use of new technologies may start with digital natives, but then rapidly spread to other generations. It reflects the inter-generational adoption of, and use of, FinTech technologies.So, when looking at the potential of new services, it is important not just to consider the young people who will adopt it. But what will happen when they introduce the technology to their friends and family. Millennials are the earthquake that shakes companies, and adopt new tech and services at lightning speed. The rest of us are the tsunami of adoption that follows and lead to exponential growth.

2. Facebook, Amazon, Google or Ant Financial will become the largest retail bank in the worldIt’s 2020 and to apply for a loan, instead of going to your local bank branch, you quickly ask Facebook for approval. This is far from fanciful thinking. Even as of today, PayPal is arguably one of the largest retail banks — it has more money in deposits than all but the largest 20 US banks, and offers services from payments, to loans and credit cards (albeit currently via partners). But we believe that one of the major tech companies, whether that is Facebook, Amazon, Google, or Ant Financial (the financial arm of Alibaba) will not only transform retail banking, but rapidly become the largest retail bank in the world.“Some bankers and analyststhink that Google, Facebook, Amazon or the like will not fully enter a highly regulated, low-margin business such as banking. I disagree. What is more, I think banks that are not prepared for such new competitors face certain death”Francisco González, CEO, BBVA

hese major tech companies have the platform and the scale to upend retail banking. They already have a digital wallet which underlies the services that enable users to buy and sell on their platforms, such as Google Wallet and Amazon Payments. Facebook Messenger Pay is already available in the US while it recently received an e-money license from the Central Bank of Ireland. This means European users will be able to store and transfer money, and make online purchases. The transition to becoming the largest retail bank in the world will be swift and brutal for traditional banks.

The Payment Systems and Services Act of 2019 (Act 987) provides the regulatory framework.  The Anti-Money Laundering Act of 2008 (Act 749), Data Protection Act of 2012 (Act 843), and Electronic Transactions Act of 2008 (Act 772) provide additional regulation.

“Egypt needs fintech, specifically after the success story of Fawry, since our financial markets are not properly regulated at the level of payments and e-commerce – all of it is more informal, so any solutions would boom,” Sharara says.

MoneyFellows, an Egyptian startup incubated in London, marries technology with traditional money circles to help people save and borrow through their social networks. Like many other startups, MoneyFellows has to work with commercial banks because the Egyptian government has strict regulations about institutions that can look after customers’ deposits.

The authors propose a new regime of regulatory systems in response to the growth of financial technology to balance innovation with objectives for economic development, financial stability, and consumer protection. This regime, called "smart regulation," requires a comprehensive review of current regulatory frameworks and systems. Smart regulation also involves technology for regulation, includes digitization of systems, and leverages advanced analytics and data.

Regtech is the management of regulatory processes within the financial industry through technology. The main functions of regtech include regulatory monitoring, reporting, and compliance. Regtech, or RegTech, consists of a group of companies that use cloud computing technology through software-as-a-service (SaaS) to help businesses comply with regulations efficiently and less expensively. Regtech is also known as regulatory technology. Financial institutions and regulators both use Regtech to deal with complicated compliance processes.

the regulator of FinTech in Ghana is the Bank of Ghana. The Act states that the Bank of Ghana shall have overall supervisory and regulatory authority in all matters relating to payment, clearing and settlement systems.

According to Section 3 of the Payment and Services Act, 2019 (Act 987), the regulator of FinTech in Ghana is the Bank of Ghana. The Act states that the Bank of Ghana shall have overall supervisory and regulatory authority in all matters relating to payment, clearing and settlement systems. As a result of the emergence of FinTech solutions, a lot of complexities have been introduced requiring the Bank of Ghana’s focus to understand and supervise FinTech activities effectively.

Purposeful effort will be required from regulators to shape the future of FinTech and push it in a productive direction in Ghana. It is hopeful that with the introduction of the FinTech and Innovation Office of the Bank of Ghana, there would be regular updates to the licensing requirements of FinTech companies that would ensure adequate compliance with international best practice and also encourage more entrepreneurs to set up FinTech companies in Ghana.

The Ghanaian unit of African telecommunication giant MTN Group Ltd. is petitioning the highest court to review a declaration that it is a significant market power. Failure could result in stricter regulation.

It wants a reversal of the National Communications Authority’s decision, which was upheld by a lower court, the continent’s biggest operator said in a statement. The designation would limit its growth and performance, the company said.

Cloud computing The banking, payment and insurance industries rely heavily on the outsourcing of various operational processes to cloud computing service providers (eg, Amazon, Google and Microsoft). The increasing reliance of the European financial sector on foreign entities has recently given French and European regulators cause for concern. In 2017, the European Banking Authority (EBA) published its "Recommendations on Outsourcing to Cloud Service Providers. These recommendations were later included in the update of the EBA Guidelines on Outsourcing Arrangements (EBA/GL/2019/02), which are fully implemented at the national level by the Prudential Supervision and Resolution Authority (ACPR). The EBA guidelines require banking and financial institutions to enter into written agreements with their service providers (including cloud service providers). These agreements should notably include provisions detailing the reporting obligations of the service provider and the audit rights of the competent authorities. In practice, the main cloud service providers are reluctant to enter into agreements which comply with the requirements of the EBA guidelines. This has prompted French and European banking and financial institutions to report these issues to their regulators. This review could lead to the drafting of a European regulation or directive determining standard contractual provisions which would be mandatorily included in agreements with cloud service providers.

Fawry gets CBE nod to partner with state-owned bank for transfer service: E-payments platform Fawry has received preliminary approval from the Central Bank of Egypt (CBE) to set up a bank transfer service for Egyptian expats; the service will be offered in partnership with an unnamed state-owned bank, CEO Ashraf Sabry tells Al Mal. Fawry has been in talks with several local and regional banks — including the National Bank of Egypt (NBE), Bank of Alexandria, Banque du Caire, and ADIB — to set up the remittances service for Egyptians living in the Gulf since last year, former managing director Mohamed Okasha said in December, saying at the time that the service would initially be rolled out in the UAE, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia. Remittances, particularly from expats in the GCC, are a key source of foreign currency for Egypt and helped to narrow its current account deficit through the worst of the pandemic in 3Q2019-2020.

Fintech, at the heart of the banking sector revolutionObviously, Fintechs and traditional banks adopt very different strategies. Indeed, while traditional institutions have a long-term vision (analysis of the financial market, risk amortization), neobanks prefer immediate action.Thus, we can consider that there are two categories of Fintech on the market. On the one hand, regulated companies that ensure compliance with regulatory constraints, and on the other, those that adopt a completely different strategy based on customer satisfaction.The first category positions itself as a direct competitor of banking establishments, while the second opts for cooperation and encourages the buyout or majority stake.Fintechs base their strategy on customer dissatisfaction, especially with their bank . These new shoots seek to improve every aspect of the banking relationship, as a priority, by neglecting issues related to organization, compliance and profitability.However, professionals remain skeptical. Do these FinTechs really hope to succeed in a few months, where several players have been striving for years? By this we mean the fact of wanting to change the regulations of the sector or even the constitution of a team of experts within a short time.So far, experts in the banking industry doubt a real revolution in banking regulation.Traditional banks remain priority players in the marketDespite the emergence of remote banking and the new measure on banking mobility , traditional banks remain the majority players in the market. Indeed, new brands are still struggling to reach the same level as a "real" bank.In addition, for the time being, income from investment funds and venture capitalists has not been of much use to the banking sector. Remember, however, that it is thanks to them that certain brands such as Uber, Amazon or Tesla have succeeded.Today, players in e-commerce are using capital increases to compensate for losses, a technique that has not yet been adopted in the banking sector. As a starting point, SoftBank has already started by building up a $ 100 billion fund for banking technology.

In 2019, Fawry became the first fintech company to IPO in the region and since taking that step, the price of its stock has risen by 300 per cent. In August, Fawry became Egypt’s first tech ‘unicorn,’ born during a global pandemic and what is quickly becoming a global economic meltdown of massive proportions.

The National Communications Authority (NCA) has sanctioned Mobile Network Operator (MNO), MTN Ghana for failing to comply with directives which were sent to them following some challenges with their network recently. In the directive, the Authority directed MTN to submit a report on the challenges within 24 hours of receipt of the directive among other directives. 

The National Communications Authority (NCA) has sanctioned Mobile Network Operator (MNO), MTN Ghana for failing to comply with directives which were sent to them following some challenges with their network recently.

“Since Sub-Saharan Africa is traditionally considered a challenging region from the remittance perspective, we are glad to extend our service to an institution that just recently has satisfied the scrutiny of the local regulator,” said Dima Kats, CEO of Clear Junction. “Our correspondent account service will lower the entry barrier for Zeepay when rolling out the payment collection in the EU and UK.”

“Since Sub-Saharan Africa is traditionally considered a challenging region from the remittance perspective, we are glad to extend our service to an institution that just recently has satisfied the scrutiny of the local regulator,” said Dima Kats, CEO of Clear Junction. “Our correspondent account service will lower the entry barrier for Zeepay when rolling out the payment collection in the EU and UK.”

The government regulates Ethiopia’s telecommunications market, meaning that there is only one telecom provider and others are not allowed. Both BelCash and M-birr are strictly technology providers. M-Birr General Manager Thierry Artaud sees the regulated market as a benefit.

Dutch company BelCash is focused on mobile banking, working in partnership with banks to provide easier access to finance through bank accounts. Ireland-based M-Birr is a mobile money service that works with micro finance institutions where no registration at a bank is needed.

Hailed as the “Kenyan technology success story”, many have claimed M-PESA to be a testimony to the greatness of the East African country’s technology scene, producing world-class technology companies that rival those in South Africa. However, is the acclaimed mobile money service really Kenyan at all? The answer is no. M-PESA is British.

By any stretch of the currently available facts, the service that accounts for more than 60 percent of Kenya’s GDP in transactions was conceived by British professionals. The company commissioned with developing the idea, Sagentia, into a workable technology was British. Additionally, the company that owns the intellectual property rights to the idea, Vodafone, is British and, lastly, it was funded in its initial stages by the British Government.

Nyagaka Anyona Ouko, a Kenyan from Nairobi, claims he is the innovator of M-Pesa and claims that Vodafone and its representatives stole the idea of Mobile Cash Transfer from him.

Financial-technology companies are changing the face of finance. Over the past ten years, what started mostly as disruption in the payments space has expanded to every corner of finance. Even areas once assumed to be safe are seeing new entrants and competitive threats. Wealth and asset management, wholesale banking, capital markets, regulation and risk (“regtech”), and trade finance are just the most recent areas to see innovation driven by small technology-first players.

Whether fintechs ultimately win or lose significant market share may be beside the point; they are redefining customer expectations and continue to create new business models. As fintechs are frequently building their entire technology stacks from the ground up, they are highlighting incumbent financial institutions’ weaknesses not only in digital user experiences but also in operational efficiency. Whether a new digital brokerage wins or loses may not matter when customer expectations around brokerage fees change. A retail foreign-exchange fintech having 5 or 50 percent of the market may matter less than retail FX margins disappearing for everyone. Whether the next crops of “neobanks” disrupt retail banking may be less important than their highlighting for users and customers the possibilities of a modern, digital-first experience.

f your downside potential from disruptive threats. Incumbents can choose to invest in companies they partner with or to focus on areas they know well or interesting adjacencies. We frequently advise clients to find ways of keeping corporate venture-capital groups slightly at arm’s length to attract skilled managers, and we recently have seen increased interest in investing in established outside managers who focus on financial technology. Transform yourself to be more like a fintech. Digital transformation is a difficult but necessary process for most incumbent financial institutions. Redesigning core infrastructure to be more modular and dynamic, driving a new agile operating model, and upgrading technology and workforce skills are all necessary to compete with outside threats, fintech and otherwise. Build your own (internal) fintech. The road for transformations is normally measured in years, but the competitive threat from fintechs is today. Increasingly, we are seeing financial institutions try to beat fintechs at their own game or self-disrupt areas of their business before others can. The key to success in new digital business building is to combine the agility, speed, and talent of a start-up with the “unfair advantage” of an incumbent by leveraging existing assets (e.g. customers, distribution, or infrastructure). Serve the fintechs. A few financial institutions can find their competitive advantage in creating scaled, efficient technology and operations to enable others to embed financial services in their customer experiences. This “banking as a service” business model depends on finding a profitable path to white labeling but draws on the inspiration of large tech platforms. Enabling the customer experiences of others has quickly moved beyond just enabling fintechs to also working with big technology companies, retailers, telecommunications companies, and beyond. Ignore fintechs. Although ignoring the competition is rarely the right choice, some businesses are built on moats—frequently regulatory—that are difficult to disrupt or they play within narrow markets. Companies should prioritize where they need to focus and in doing so know when they need to pay attention and when they need to avoid the distraction of disrupters.

FinTechs and the Value Chains in the Financial IndustryIt is beneficial to remember how things worked before and after FinTechs and TechFins or big techs in the financial industry.Banking models are shifting significantly from a pipeline, vertical, paradigm, to modular solutions that pave the way to new banking paradigms that entail higher levels of openness toward third parties and a growing number of modular services bundled together.Value is created in platforms through economies of scope in production and innovation (Gawer, 2014). In order for platforms to work, adoption and network effects are essential. Models can go to mere compliance with the prescriptions of openness of PSD2, to the inclusion of new services, the opening of the banking core and data, and the aggregation of those within a platform experience. In particular, we assist both to the evolution of a Bank-as-a-Platform model and a tech-platform-driven model supporting banking and financial intermediation, which both constitute a new interesting field of analysis.Since the wave of digital transformation started entering the financial industr

, banking-as-a-business has started moving from a product/service perspective to more contextual solutions where providers are customer needs-driven. This is because customer-driven companies outperform the shareholder-driven ones, and this requires an outside-in approach.Having said that, it is beneficial to remember that digital transformation implies four main categories of innovation (product, process, organizational and business model) (Omarini, 2019, p. 340); all of them require rediscovering that a new strategy paradigm exists. This regards the concept of co-creation, and because of this no single firm can unilaterally carry out a process of continuous experimentation, risk reduction, time compression, and minimizing investment while maximizing market impact. Co-creation requires access to resources from extended networks (suppliers, partners, and consumer communities).Under these new market conditions, FinTechs have become an important piece of a bigger puzzle, each one in its own area of business (payment, lending, etc.), while at the beg

inning most of them started as mono-business companies. Only a few of them may become leaders in the market. On the one hand, there are those that make their strategy become international, and on the other, there are FinTechs which enlarge their services-scopes. However, the majority of them will become part of ecosystems where the direction could swing from banks to tech companies or to FinTechs as well, able to manage the network by developing kinds of conglomerate-as-a-service.Another interesting point to outline regards this recent period where all of us have experienced lockdowns around the world, and some effects have also impacted FinTechs as well. The valuations of most unicorns have crashed overnight, while on the FinTechs side there are different situations. Some of them have experienced a dramatic reduction in their

An Egyptian digital payments firm has quadrupled in value during the pandemic, helped by a government push to reduce citizens’ heavy reliance on cash. Investors and analysts are split on whether the stock rally has further legs.

A 300% rally from a mid-March low has boosted its market value to 20 billion Egyptian pounds ($1.3 billion). That puts Fawry among the country’s 10 most valuable companies alongside firms such as Telecom Egypt Co. and Elswedy Electric Co., which generate many times more revenue and profit.