- The big announcement this week was the well documented $400m investment by
e&
into
Careem
's Super App for the region, which will be spun out into a standalone company. Uber will retain full ownership of the ride-hailing business. It will be interesting to see how this affects the
e& money
's strategy and whether they'll use Careem as a distribution channel for their mobile wallet technology.
Forbes
announced their Top 30 Middle East Fintechs with payment companies dominating the listing (
Telr
PayTabs Global
Tamara
,
Tabby
,
Lean Technologies
) with Egyptian companies making a real impact, led by
Fawry
,
Valu
and
MNT-Halan
.
- During a radio interview on Dubai One,
Dr Saeeda Jaffar
, Group Country Manager, and Senior Vice President, for
Visa
operations across the GCC the shift toward using digital money and digital ways of transferring money. Listen to the interview.
- London-based?
TerraPay
?has closed its Series B equity financing round, raising in excess of $100 million in equity and debt financing, funding its proposed expansion further into LATAM and MENA regions.?(Link)
- The Qatar Central Bank announced that
MyFatoorah
has been granted a license to provide digital payment services, bringing the number of companies under the supervision of QCB to 7.
- The MENA region has seen a number of high profile IPO's in recent years and
Redseer Middle East
who take predict a strong pipeline of potential IPOs amongst ~350 unicorns/soonicorns over the next 8 years. (Report)
