This is Follow the Money, our weekly series that unpacks the earnings, business, and scaling strategies of African fintechs, financial institutions, companies, and governments. A new edition drops every Monday.
When Fawry launched in 2008 as an e-payment switch connecting utility providers and telecom operators to consumers through retail agents, its pitch was simple: Egypt was a cash-heavy economy, and it wanted to digitise it.
That limited scope has since expanded into a sprawling financial ecosystem that now serves nearly half of Egypt’s population, powering daily utility payments, loans, insurance, and other financial services. Fawry is now Egypt’s largest mobile money platform, and its revenue has equally grown.
In 2017, the company earned EGP 432 million (*$24.2 million) in revenue and netted EGP 53.7 million (*$3 million) in profit.
By 2025, its revenue has climbed to EGP 8.65 billion ($166.7 million), while net revenue reached EGP 3.1 billion ($59.7 million). After accounting for minority shareholders, Fawry’s take-home profit stood at EGP 2.89 billion ($55.7 million).
Fawry now earns more than 20 times what it did in 2017.
The $1.3B Money Loop
Mapping Fawry’s Financial Evolution
As of Monday, the company’s market capitalisation stands at EGP 67.72 billion ($1.3 billion), nearly double from the previous year, and has increased by 1,029% since its 2019 listing on the Egyptian Exchange.
The company last crossed a $1 billion market valuation in 2020. Today, it is Egypt’s second-largest listed fintech by market capitalisation, after the state-owned e-finance.
It now processes about six million transactions daily, controlling physical and digital rails where consumer payments happen. Fawry has embedded itself deeply into the country’s informal market through acquisitions, unlocking new revenue streams to achieve scale and national relevance.
Where it began: Transaction and collection fees
To understand Fawry, it is necessary to consider the reality of Egypt’s payments economy in the late 2000s: cash, cheques, and large-value interbank transfers were the most common means of payment, with cash being the major instrument for individuals.
Fawry’s initial strategy was not to eliminate cash, but to digitise its endpoint. By placing point-of-sale (PoS) machines in local corner stores, pharmacies, and kiosks, the company created a toll bridge between consumers and their utility providers, telecom operators, and government services.
Each time a customer pays a bill or tops up a mobile phone, Fawry takes a small cut. In 2017, this steady accumulation of micro-fees accounted for the bulk—about EGP 423.1 million (*$23.7 million)—of the total EGP 432 million (*$24.2 million) in operating revenue.
Over the next decade, Fawry aggressively expanded its network to over 300,000 service points, reaching 54.1 million users as of Q2 2025, the last reported customer count. Beyond growing the number of retail outlets, Fawry implemented a diversified, omnichannel expansion strategy.
First, luck met timing. In May 2020, the Central Bank of Egypt (CBE) launched a campaign to deploy 100,000 PoS devices by December to ease access to financial services for citizens. The country’s State Information Service (SIS), its media and public relations agency, said that the CBE bore the cost of that deployment.
As part of that initiative, Fawry scaled its deployment of PoS machines through partnerships with Egyptian banks, earning regulatory incentives for each device it installed.
In its 2020 results, the fintech earned EGP 55 million ($3.5 million) in incentives linked to that initiative. During the same period, it incurred EGP 35.4 million ($2.24 million) in costs to purchase and deploy those PoS devices, which were removed from its fixed assets, resulting in a net gain of EGP 21.4 million ($1.4 million), according to its consolidated report.
In 2021, Fawry also earned EGP 21.7 million ($1.4 million) from similar CBE-linked PoS incentives, according to its consolidated report.
Second, it tapped into high-velocity transaction flows. Fawry embedded its electronic gateway technology within existing infrastructure, enabling transactions through bank automated teller machines (ATMs), mobile devices, e-banking platforms, and the Egyptian Post’s nationwide network.
To complement this third-party reach, the company built its own physical footprint through its subsidiary, Fawry Plus, which operates dedicated branches providing electronic payment services directly to customers.
By controlling these retail channels, a fractional fee Fawry translated into a large, consistent revenue stream.
In 2025, of Fawry’s EGP 8.65 billion ($166.7 million) in total operating revenue, EGP 6.22 billion ($120 million) came from transaction services alone, up 41% from EGP 4.41 billion (****$100.1 million) in 2024.
This remains the company’s foundational engine.
2025 Revenue Engine Audit
Follow the Money: Operating Segments
Fawry has maintained its mobile money and e-payment businesses by investing significant amounts each year to distribute PoS machines and integrate backend systems with billers.
In 2025, Fawry invested EGP 565.6 million ($10.9 million) in new PoS devices. It also spent EGP 64.96 million ($1.25 million) on disposing of old machines during the same year, bringing the total cumulative value of its PoS asset to EGP 1.68 billion ($32.3 million) by the end of the year.
Fawry invests in the formal disposal of old PoS machines in compliance with Egypt’s waste management law (Law 202/2020), which also applies to electronic and electrical equipment (EEE). Under the framework, Fawry has an extended producer responsibility (EPR) to ensure proper end-of-life management of the hardware it puts into the market.
As of 2025, the company also recorded EGP 1.75 billion ($33.6 million) in the fair value of its proprietary technological platform. Software licences, which account for third-party tools required to operate the network, recorded EGP 156 million ($3 million).
Fawry’s e-payment and PoS businesses have provided steady income that supports the company’s more advanced financial activities.
The 20x Evolution
Financial Transformation Loop
The pivot: High-margin micro and consumer lending
Once a company controls payment flows, it gains insight into financial behaviour. That visibility enabled Fawry’s second and most transformative engine—lending—to unlock high-margin scale.
While Fawry had registered a legal subsidiary called ‘Fawry Micro Finance’ by 2017, it was not yet operational at scale. At the time, the subsidiary had an authorised capital of only EGP 15 million (*$789,000), of which just 50% was paid up.
By the end of 2018, Fawry held only EGP 364,483 (**$20,484) in micro-finance loans. Its expansion into micro-lending and consumer finance only began to accelerate between 2020 and 2022.
By 2025, the segment had become a core money engine for the company, with its microfinance loan book growing by 771,262% since 2018.
Even so, in its full-year 2025 results, micro-finance revenue—EGP 2.17 billion ($41.8 million)—remained below its banking technology and e-payments business, which brought in EGP 6.49 billion ($125 million).
Growth, however, has been rapid. Since 2022, Fawry’s micro-finance business has expanded by 691% in assets and 763% in revenue.
The company has leveraged its transaction data to offer embedded finance and merchant credit, positioning the segment as a hedge against Egypt’s macroeconomic volatility, including periods when Inflation accelerated above the 30% mark between February 2023 and April 2024.
For years, Fawry was content taking a fractional fee for moving money. But processing payments is ultimately a high-volume, low-margin business.
At the end of 2025, Fawry held EGP 221.3 million ($4.3 million) in customer financing risk provisions for impaired loans, up from EGP 161 million (****$3.7 million) in the previous year. However, the expansion of its lending portfolio outpaced that increase.
The ratio of these impaired loans to its total loan book declined to 3.88%, from 5.16% in 2024, pointing to tighter control over borrower cash flows and more disciplined credit risk pricing without slowing lending growth.
Fawry has insights into merchants’ businesses and payment flows, enabling it to offer and price loans.
By 2025, its revenue from micro-finance and consumer lending reached EGP 2.17 billion ($41.8 million), up 129.6% from EGP 943.6 million (****$21.4 million) the previous year.
By the end of 2025, Fawry’s gross microfinance and small-to-medium business (SMB) loans stood at EGP 2.81 billion ($54.2 million). Its consumer finance loan book, built on the same ecosystem, climbed to EGP 2.88 billion ($55.5 million).
The Lending Explosion
Visualising Fawry’s Pivot to Credit
This segment is now the company’s fastest-growing major revenue line. It fundamentally alters Fawry’s unit economics: instead of earning small fees on transactions, the company captures interest income on larger, longer-duration loans.
Its payment network doubles as a customer acquisition channel, feeding borrowers directly into its lending business.
How Fawry uses pre-funded balances
When consumers pay bills or top up mobile credit through Fawry, their services are credited immediately, while settlement to billers and merchants follows agreed payout schedules rather than necessarily occurring in real time.
Customer and merchant money sits in Fawry’s settlement accounts for short periods under agreed payout schedules, creating a pool of short‑term balances for Fawry.
When a company processes billions of Egyptian pounds across hundreds of millions of transactions, those constantly renewing settlement balances become an enormous, rolling reservoir of liquidity.
Fawry does not let that liquidity sit idle; it deploys a substantial share into short‑term Egyptian government Treasury bills—typically with maturities of at least three months—and interest‑bearing bank deposits.
The money the company uses to buy Treasury bills is mainly these short‑term balances it holds from customers, merchants, and billers, plus any excess cash from its own operations.
By the end of 2025, Fawry merchants’ advances alone stood at EGP 4.11 billion ($79 million), with a further EGP 2.96 billion ($57 million) recorded as accounts and notes payable to billers and only EGP 876.5 million ($16.8 million) as advances to billers.
Set against those settlement and pre‑funding balances, Fawry’s Treasury bill portfolio was EGP 3.78 billion ($72.7 million), and its cash and bank balances totalled EGP 5.94 billion ($114.3 million).
Its government‑bond investments are funded by a mix of merchant pre‑funding, amounts collected and not yet remitted to billers, and the group’s own retained excess cash from operations.
The CBE aggressively raised interest rates between 2022 and 2024 to combat Inflation, pushing discount rates as high as 27.75% in March 2024. These government bonds offered high, risk-free yields.
Fawry has leaned into this, earning what is essentially spread income from the gap between when it collects from consumers and merchants and when it must settle with billers, on top of its own accumulated profits.
The strategy dates back years. In 2017, the company reported EGP 44.2 million (*$2.3 million) in credit interest, supported by EGP 111.5 million (*$5.9 million)—including accrued interest and deducted taxes—held in Treasury bills the same year. As transaction volumes increased, so did the settlement balances and the associated income.
In 2023, Fawry earned EGP 464.4 million (***$15.2 million) in “credit interest” across Treasury bills, current accounts, and time deposits. By 2024, this rose nearly 49% to EGP 691.2 million (**$15.7 million), driven largely by Treasury‑bill returns.
Fawry ended 2024 holding EGP 2.24 billion (**$50.8 million) in its Treasury‑bill portfolio, including accrued interest and deducted taxes—enough to generate EGP 541.6 million (****$12.4 million) in interest income that year.
By 2025, it grew its Treasury bills interest income to EGP 817.8 million ($15.8 million); its broader credit interest income, including current accounts and time deposits, reached roughly EGP 1.04 billion ($20 million).
Fawry also parks part of these balances at commercial banks because it still needs cash on hand every day to settle accounts.
It maintains liquidity in interest‑bearing bank accounts (current accounts) and short‑term bank deposits (time deposits). While the interest rates on these commercial bank accounts are likely lower than what the government pays for Treasury bills, this money is highly liquid.
In 2025, Fawry earned around EGP 225.2 million ($4.3 million) in credit interest from current accounts and time deposits, increasing by 50.5% from the previous year.
Passive Profit Machine
Credit Interest Growth Audit
Tap a bar to audit segments
This is Fawry’s most efficient money engine. It requires zero marketing spend, no customer acquisition costs, and no new product launches.
By functioning as the primary aggregator for Egypt’s daily micro‑economy—and investing the settlement balances that role creates—the company passively generates a steady stream of high‑margin interest income simply from holding funds in transit.
Experimenting with securitisation as a revenue line
A successful lending business eventually hits a natural ceiling: it can only lend as much capital as it holds on its balance sheet. In 2017, Fawry was a straightforward payment processor making some extra cash on the float.
To extend its credit operations, Fawry introduced securitisation in 2025.
Rather than waiting months or years for borrowers to repay their microloans, Fawry bundles and sells them as bond-like portfolios to institutional investors, turning future repayments into upfront capital while retaining a margin on the sale.
In May 2025, Fawry signed a securitisation transfer agreement with Capital for Securitisation Company (CSC) to execute its first issuance, valued at EGP 497.5 million ($9.6 million). The transaction generated an immediate securitisation surplus of EGP 40.5 million ($780,600).
That securitisation strategy frees up liquidity for Fawry. By offloading loans, Fawry can recoup its capital instantly. It can then recycle that capital into its retail network to issue a new wave of consumer and micro-finance loans, restarting its high-yield interest cycle without draining its own reserves.
Fawry’s financial filings reveal that the initial 2025 securitised debt issuance is part of a broader EGP 8 billion ($154.2 million) programme planned over three years. By converting loans into tradable securities, Fawry has created a mechanism to continuously fund its lending operations.
The equity play: Strategic investments
To ensure that money stays within its network, Fawry actively invests in the broader Egyptian digital economy. Rather than settling for being a third-party payment processor for other businesses, the company takes equity stakes in the platforms where consumers and merchants transact.
In 2017, Fawry was just beginning its strategy of buying into the ecosystem, but it was nowhere near the scale of its 2025 portfolio. At the time, its primary equity play was a modest EGP 2.1 million (*$117,810) investment in an associate company, Fawry Plus for Banking Services, where it held a 38% stake at the time. It had not yet acquired stakes in major logistics and digital players like Bosta, Roaderz, or Waffarha.
Over time, Fawry expanded into adjacent sectors, taking stakes in logistics, delivery, discounts, and digital booking platforms, where merchants offer goods and services directly to consumers.
It now holds positions in Bosta (logistics), Waffarha (e-commerce discounts), Roaderz (last-mile delivery), and Tazcara (online bus booking). Where necessary, Fawry takes control: in Q1 2025, it increased its stake in software provider Codezone to 51% for EGP 31.3 million ($603,270), consolidating it as a subsidiary.
This strategy ensures that Fawry’s payment infrastructure and lending products are embedded within high-traffic retail platforms. The company captures transaction fees, earns float income, and ultimately claims a share in the profits of partner businesses.
Consolidating money engines into a HoldCo
By 2025, the scale of these five money engines meant Fawry had completely outgrown its origins as a simple bill-payment switch. The company’s expanding operations required structural reorganisation.
In November 2025, the company established Fawry Holding for Financial Investments, a new holding company (HoldCo) approved by Egypt’s Financial Regulatory Authority (FRA), the regulator that oversees non‑banking financial services, to consolidate its existing and future subsidiaries and investments under a unified group structure.
The move consolidated ownership and improved financial oversight across its diversified operations.
Fawry controls or holds positions in several IT and non-banking financial services segments, including Fawry Integrated Systems, Fawry Dahab, Fawry Micro Finance, Fawry Insurance Brokerage, Fawry FMCG, Fawry for Commercial Technology, Fawry Consumer Finance, Fawry Plus, Fawry Gulf, Dirac for Information Systems, and InsurTech investments.
Today, it operates as a closed, self-sustaining financial loop. It gathers capital and data through millions of daily transactions, deploys floats into government securities, channels insights into lending, recycles capital via securitisation, and buys equity in its partners to guarantee the traffic never stops.
* Exchange rate as of 2017; $1 = 19.01 EGP
** Exchange rate as of 2018; $1 = EGP 17.79
*** Exchange rate as of 2023; $1 = EGP 30.58
**** Exchange rate as of 2024; $1 = EGP 44.05
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