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Egypt’s Paymob Becomes First International Fintech Company to Obtain Full Payment License in Oman

January 19, 2024

In a pioneering move, Paymob, the leading financial services enabler in the Middle East, North Africa, and Pakistan (MENAP) region, has successfully obtained a Payment Service Provider (PSP) license from the Central Bank of Oman, becoming the first international fintech company to achieve this feat in the Sultanate.

The PSP license, acquired by Paymob after meeting all regulatory requirements stipulated by the Central Bank of Oman, grants the company the authority to accept and process payments both online and in physical stores throughout the Sultanate. This achievement is facilitated by local integration with the Central Bank of Oman Payments Network, known as Oman Net. The license also allows Paymob to offer a streamlined payment gateway, enabling merchants in the local market to accept a wide range of local and international payments.

Paymob’s CEO, Islam Shawqi, expressed pride in the company’s historic accomplishment, stating, “We are proud to be the first international fintech company to obtain a payment services provider license in the Sultanate of Oman. We appreciate the trust placed in our technology by the Central Bank of Oman, and we remain committed to enabling the growth of SMEs in the Sultanate.”

The Omani banking sector has been experiencing a notable shift towards digitization in recent years. The period from 2018 to 2022 witnessed a remarkable 300% increase in transactions processed through the Oman Net payments network, demonstrating the business sector’s commitment to digital transformation in line with Oman Vision 2040.

The issuance of the PSP license to Paymob aligns with the broader goals of Oman Vision 2040, emphasizing the importance of transitioning towards a digital economy. With electronic transactions soaring from 82.4 million to 252.9 million during this period, the Omani banking sector is clearly embracing digitization as a key driver of economic growth.

By obtaining the PSP license in Oman, Paymob continues to fulfill its mission of empowering SMEs in the MENAP region to thrive in the digital economy. The company offers a comprehensive range of innovative digital payment solutions, boasting forty payment methods — the most extensive selection in the region. These services contribute to increased sales, improved conversion rates, and enhanced customer retention, positioning Paymob as a crucial player in the evolving landscape of financial technology.

Founded in 2015, Paymob has rapidly emerged as one of the fastest-growing fintech companies in the MENAP region. With more than 250,000 merchants currently served, the company has garnered support from a distinguished group of regional and global investors, including PayPal Ventures, Kora Capital, Clay Point Capital, Global Ventures, FMO, A15, British International Investment, Helios Digital Ventures, and Nclude.

As Paymob paves the way for further fintech advancements in Oman, the company’s success highlights the ongoing transformation of the regional financial landscape and the increasing importance of digital payments in shaping the economic future of the Sultanate.

Charles Rapulu Udoh is a Lagos-based lawyer, who has several years of experience working in Africa’s burgeoning tech startup industry. He has closed multi-million dollar deals bordering on venture capital, private equity, intellectual property (trademark, patent or design, etc.), mergers and acquisitions, in countries such as in the Delaware, New York, UK, Singapore, British Virgin Islands, South Africa, Nigeria etc. He’s also a corporate governance and cross-border data privacy and tax expert. As an award-winning writer and researcher, he is passionate about telling the African startup story, and is one of the continent’s pioneers in this regard.

Paymob, Egyptian Fintech Startup Expands Into The UAE

November 6, 2022

Islam Shawky, the co-founder and CEO of Paymob

The Egyptian fintech startup Paymob, described as the leading omnichannel payments facilitator in the MENAP region has embarked on the next phase of its regional expansion with a launch in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

Paymob was founded in 2015 by Islam Shawky, Alain El Hajj and Mostafa Menessy, Paymob is an infrastructure technology enabler providing payment solutions to empower digital financial service providers through mobile wallet technology.

Its omnichannel gateway offers more than 40 payment methods and empowers over 150,000 SME merchants to manage and scale their businesses by giving them access to financial services not readily available in emerging markets.

The startup launched in Pakistan in April, and in May announced it had raised a US$50 million Series B funding round to help it launch new products and expand into additional markets. Its next market, it now announces, is the UAE, where it will serve SMEs and microbusinesses across the seven Emirates with digital payments solutions.

“The UAE is a dynamic ecosystem that fosters entrepreneurship and innovation, largely enabled by tremendous support from the public sector. There are currently over 400,000 businesses in the UAE, 61 per cent of which are microbusinesses and 38 per cent are SMEs. We see a massive opportunity to serve this market segment and our goal over the next three years is to empower 15 per cent of those merchants with the latest payment technologies to fuel their growth and further digitise the economy,” said Shawky.

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Kelechi Deca

Kelechi Deca has over two decades of media experience, he has traveled to over 77 countries reporting on multilateral development institutions, international business, trade, travels, culture, and diplomacy. He is also a petrol head with in-depth knowledge of automobiles and the auto industry

Egypt’s Paymob Raises $50M Series B, Backed By PayPal

May 9, 2022

Ashish Aggarwal, the director at co-lead investor PayPal VenturesAshish Aggarwal, the director at co-lead investor PayPal Ventures

Paymob, an Egyptian fintech that allows retailers to accept digital payments both online and in-store, said today that it has raised $50 million in Series B funding round.

PayPal Ventures, PayPal’s worldwide corporate venture arm, Kora Capital of New York, and Clay Point of London led the round.

Helios Digital Ventures, British International Investment (previously the CDC Group), and Nclude, the startup fund formed by Global Ventures and three Egyptian banks, are among the new investors. Existing investors from its $18.5 million Series A last April — A15, FMO, and Global Ventures increased their stake.

Ashish Aggarwal, the director at co-lead investor PayPal Ventures

The investment, one of the largest at this level in Egypt and the MENA region, takes Paymob’s total fundraising to more than $68.5 million.

Why The Investors Invested

The startup has generated considerable traction since it was last funded. Paymob had over 35,000 local and international retailers using their payment gateways last year, including Swvl, LG, Breadfast, and Homzmart. This merchant figure, which now includes Vodafone, LG, Virgin, Chalhoub Group, and Decathlon, has more than tripled to more than 100,000. CEO Islam Shawky claims that Paymob intends to reach a million SMEs in the coming years.

Paymob also reported a total payment volume of $5 billion in 2020; the current value could not be determined. However, according to other metrics released by the corporation, monthly volumes increased 4x year on year as of December 2021. According to its website, Paymob had completed over 120 million transactions as of 2020.

“Paymob is innovating at scale in the offline merchant acquiring and online payment gateway space as Egypt and the Middle East transition from being primarily cash-led to a digital heavy mode of transacting.” Among its other plans for merchants include introducing a new checkout platform and the launch of cards to enable B2B transactions,” Nitin Saigal, the founder of Kora Management, said in a statement.

“Paymob shares our mission and ambition of advancing digital payments adoption — it has made impressive strides in supporting the growth and success of underserved SMBs,” Ashish Aggarwal, the director at co-lead investor PayPal Ventures, said in a statement.

This is PayPal’s first investment in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), and the firm’s second in Africa following the South African open finance company Stitch. PayPal’s participation continues a trend from last year that saw global investors make their first batch of acquisitions, particularly in fintech, a sector that provided 60 percent of the overall VC funding.

A Look At What The Startup Does

Founded in 2015 by Islam Shawky, Alain El Hajj and Mostafa El Menessy, Paymob is an infrastructure technology enabler providing payment solutions to empower digital financial service providers across Africa and the Middle East through mobile wallet technology. The startup offers a variety of products and APIs that enable online and offline businesses to receive and send payments. The merchants can without difficulty integrate Paymob’s payment APIs into their websites or mobile applications to collect payments from their customers using first-rate fee strategies such as cards, mobile wallets, and cash on delivery.

“Our mission is that we want to help the merchants grow,” said Shawky, who launched the Cairo-based fintech in 2015 with Alain El Hajj and Mostafa Menessy. “So together we offer merchants, whether an SME or an international brand, the ability to accept all those payment methods and thus, increasing the probability and enhancing the probability for them to purchase and hopefully grow the revenue.”

Paymob asserts that it serves merchants in additional areas, including Kenya and Palestine, but it has not yet established a presence in these regions. Instead, the company has set its sights on a handful of GCC and North African markets, for which this growth investment provides the necessary launch capital. Paymob will also chase a larger market share in Egypt and expand its product portfolio to include expense management software and the provision of working capital.

The expansion to Pakistan could accelerate Paymob’s growth by the end of the year. According to a statement, the Egyptian fintech intends to add 100,000 merchants from the South Asian nation, which is home to over 4 million SMEs, within the next two years.

PayPal PayMob PayPal PayMob

Egypt’s Paymob Raises $18.5m Series A, Highest Ever For A Fintech Startup

Charles Rapulu Udoh

Charles Rapulu Udoh is a Lagos-based lawyer, who has several years of experience working in Africa’s burgeoning tech startup industry. He has closed multi-million dollar deals bordering on venture capital, private equity, intellectual property (trademark, patent or design, etc.), mergers and acquisitions, in countries such as in the Delaware, New York, UK, Singapore, British Virgin Islands, South Africa, Nigeria etc. He’s also a corporate governance and cross-border data privacy and tax expert.
As an award-winning writer and researcher, he is passionate about telling the African startup story, and is one of the continent’s pioneers in this regard. You can book a session and speak with him using the link: https://insightsbyexperts.com/view_expert/charles-rapulu-udoh

Egypt’s Paymob Raises $18.5m Series A, Highest Ever For A Fintech Startup

April 8, 2021

Islam Shawky, Alain El Hajj and Mostafa El Menessy, Paymob Founders

Cairo-based fintech Paymob has raised $18.5 million in a Series A round led by Global Ventures, the company announced today. The round is made up of $15 million in glowing funding and $3.5 million that was paid out in July 2020 as the first tranche. A15 and FMO, the Dutch entrepreneurial development bank, were also involved in the transaction. It is Egypt’s largest-ever Series A round raised by a fintech company.

“We couldn’t be more excited for Paymob’s next step of growth; the business probability in the location is unprecedented,” said Islam Shawky, co-founder and CEO of Paymob. The wide digital repayments gap still remains, and we are thrilled to be collaborating with forward-thinking regulators to address it.”
Read also:Ivory Coast-based Fintech Startup HUB2 Raises $1.8m To Fasten Growth In African Markets

“This new capital raise would accelerate our progress in reducing the digital payments bottleneck. All of our current merchants have increased their shares, and we thank them all for their support and confidence in our industrial company model and execution track record,” he said.

Here Is What You Need To Know

With the influx of cash, the company plans to accelerate its expansion into Saudi Arabia and other regional markets this year. It would also put the funds into expanding its regional carrier business and expanding its product line.

All investors in this round had previously participated in the startup’s $3.5m part Series A fundraise last year.

Why The Investors Invested

Global Ventures is a Dubai-based VC led by Noor Sweid who was previously a managing partner at Beirut-based Leap Ventures and most recently Chief Investment Officer of Dubai Future Foundation, and Basil Moftah, the former president of Intellectual Property & Science at Thomson Reuters. He had led the acquisition of Zawya for Thomson Reuters and exited a $1 billion revenue division of Thomson Reuters to a private equity firm in 2016 for $3.55 billion. The firm generally invests in revenue-generating startups (with at least $1 million in annual revenue) across Middle East & Africa but has made few exceptions. On its website, Global Venture says that they’re looking for startups that are revenue-generating, industry winners, capital-efficient, immensely scalable and have a clear path to exit.

Basil Moftah, General Partner of Global Ventures, said, “We are delighted to lead this momentous fintech fundraise in the region. Paymob has a best mixture of a extraordinarily acceptable technology, a product customers more and increased can not do without, and an top notch administration team. Their market possibility is in addition huge; Egypt’s transformation to a cashless society is being enabled with the useful aid of way of the unique merchandise Paymob has built. We show up ahead to persevering with assisting their expansion
Read also:These Payments Companies Are Now Allowed To Carry Out International Money Transfer In Nigeria

Established in 1970, FMO is 51-percent held by the Dutch government and 49-percent by private sector institutions. The development finance institution works toward the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals by funding capacity development as well as placing debt and equity investments in sectors such as agribusiness, financial institutions, and energy. During the six months ending June 2020, FMO lost EUR 280 million (USD 330 million) on a total portfolio of EUR 12.7 billion (USD 14.9 billion).

A15 is an Amsterdam-based Middle East and Africa-focused venture capital company that invests in digital products and technology brands. The VC had, in October last year, made a six-figure investment in Cairo-based community-inspired startup, Milango.

A Look At What Paymob Does

Founded by Islam Shawky, Alain El Hajj and Mostafa El Menessy, Paymob is an infrastructure technology enabler providing payment solutions to empower digital financial service providers across Africa and the Middle East through mobile wallet technology. The startup offers a variety of products and APIs that enable online and offline businesses to receive and send payments. The merchants can without difficulty integrate Paymob’s payment APIs into their websites or mobile applications to collect payments from their customers using first-rate fee strategies such as cards, mobile wallets, and cash on delivery.

The startup said in a statement that revenue for its charge acceptance commercial enterprise enterprise increased by more than 5 times in 2020, with its research now being used by over 35,000 nearby and global shops like Swvl, LG, Samsonite, and the American University in Cairo. To date, the startup claims to have processed repayments of more than $5 billion.

The startup’s mobile wallet infrastructure processes more than 85 per cent of the market share of the transaction’s throughput in the Egyptian market, and serves merchants across five different markets, including Kenya, Pakistan and Palestine, and serving millions of customers on a monthly basis.

Chief operating officer El-Hajj said Paymob’s merchants and partners would benefit directly from the funding as Paymob will ramp up investments in its core payments offering to better serve its existing base and cater for the increasing demand.

“Empowering our merchants and partners networks in Egypt and Africa has and will always be at the heart and core of what we do at Paymob,” he said.

Charles Rapulu Udoh

Charles Rapulu Udoh is a Lagos-based lawyer who has advised startups across Africa on issues such as startup funding (Venture Capital, Debt financing, private equity, angel investing etc), taxation, strategies, etc. He also has special focus on the protection of business or brands’ intellectual property rights ( such as trademark, patent or design) across Africa and other foreign jurisdictions.
He is well versed on issues of ESG (sustainability), media and entertainment law, corporate finance and governance.
He is also an award-winning writer

Paymob Series A Paymob Series A Paymob Series A

Egypt’s Fintech Startup Paymob Secures $3.5m From Global Ventures

August 12, 2020

Paymob, an Egyptian digital payments provider, has landed a US$3.5 million funding round to grow its merchant network and accelerate regional expansion.

“In a world where consumers are currently adopting digital products in all aspects of their lives, now is the time to invest in Paymob products to empower the digital economy. These unprecedented times has proven the need for a robust digital payments infrastructure to serve the rising demand from all business types and sizes during the pandemic which resulted in a drastic increase of 450 per cent increase in merchant on-boarding rate since the beginning of Covid-19,” said Shawky, Paymob’s chief executive officer (CEO).

Here Is What You Need To Know

Paymob’s latest funding round was led by Global Ventures and the Dutch Entrepreneurial Development Bank FMO with a follow-on investment by A15.
The startup will use the proceeds to further expand its merchants’ network to rising demand, as well as product development and the establishment of a larger regional footprint. It plans to extend its products to more markets in Africa and the GCC.

Why The Investors Invested

Basil Moftah, general partner at Global Ventures, said his team was “incredibly excited” to partner with the Paymob team, as the need for financial inclusion is exacerbated by the current global pandemic.

“Led by a dynamic team, Paymob has a unique market position to offer integrated infrastructure solutions and payment services across a range of payment methods and channels. Paymob and Global Ventures share similar DNA — the ability to see problems in a different light, the creativity to rethink how things are done, and the courage to get it done,” he said.

A Look At What The Startup Does

Founded by Islam Shawky, Alain El Hajj and Mostafa El Menessy, Paymob is an infrastructure technology enabler providing payment solutions to empower digital financial service providers across Africa and the Middle East through mobile wallet technology.

The startup’s mobile wallet infrastructure processes more than 85 per cent of the market share of the transaction’s throughput in the Egyptian market, and serves merchants across five different markets, including Kenya, Pakistan and Palestine, and serving millions of customers on a monthly basis.

Chief operating officer El-Hajj said Paymob’s merchants and partners would benefit directly from the funding as Paymob will ramp up investments in its core payments offering to better serve its existing base and cater for the increasing demand.

“Empowering our merchants and partners networks in Egypt and Africa has and will always be at the heart and core of what we do at Paymob,” he said.

Charles Rapulu Udoh

Charles Rapulu Udoh is a Lagos-based lawyer who has advised startups across Africa on issues such as startup funding (Venture Capital, Debt financing, private equity, angel investing etc), taxation, strategies, etc. He also has special focus on the protection of business or brands’ intellectual property rights ( such as trademark, patent or design) across Africa and other foreign jurisdictions.
He is well versed on issues of ESG (sustainability), media and entertainment law, corporate finance and governance.
He is also an award-winning writer