FAWRY

Ashraf Sabry started Fawry in 2008 with a very Egyptian problem in mind. Almost nobody had a bank account, but everybody had bills.

Electricity, water, phone credit, all of it usually paid in person, in cash, after standing in a line. Sabry, a tech entrepreneur, wanted to make paying a bill as easy as buying bread.

So Fawry built a network. It plugged into banks on one side and into thousands of small shops, kiosks, and post offices on the other.

You could walk into your corner store, hand over cash, and pay any bill through Fawry's system. Simple, and exactly what the country needed.

Fawry sits in the middle of every payment and takes a tiny slice. A person pays a bill through a Fawry kiosk, shop, or the app.

The money flows from the customer, through Fawry, to the company being paid. Fawry earns a small fee on each transaction.

Multiply that by tens of millions of payments a month and it adds up fast. It also sells services to businesses and banks, plus a growing digital wallet and app.

The genius is volume. Small fees, enormous scale.

The backbone is the Fawry payment network, the kiosks and shop terminals where people pay bills in cash. myFawry is the consumer app for paying and managing money from a phone.

Fawry Pay handles online and card payments for businesses. It also offers microloans, banking services for small businesses, and a digital wallet.

Together they cover almost every way an Egyptian might move money.

Fawry grew by becoming physical infrastructure, not just an app. It signed up hundreds of thousands of small shops as payment points, reaching people who would never download a fintech app.

That agent network is the moat, the wall that keeps rivals out. By the time smartphones and wallets took off, Fawry was already everywhere.

The 2019 IPO turned that reach into a war chest. It now connects dozens of banks, hundreds of thousands of agents, and tens of millions of customers.

Being public and being Egyptian is a hard combination right now. The Egyptian pound has lost a lot of value, and Fawry's stock has swung wildly since its 2019 debut.

Its business is huge in volume but earns thin margins on each payment. Competition is heating up too, with newer players like Paymob chasing the same merchants and payments.

And as Egypt slowly digitizes, Fawry has to shift from cash kiosks to digital wallets without losing the network that made it big.

Before going public, Fawry was backed by serious names. In 2015 a consortium led by Helios Investment Partners, along with the Egyptian-American Enterprise Fund and the MENA Long-Term Value Fund, took a majority stake.

That capital and credibility set up the 2019 IPO on the Egyptian Exchange, which was oversubscribed 30 times. Today Fawry trades publicly under the ticker FWRY, and its investor base is the public market itself.