Let me start with a number: 370 million. That is the approximate number of adults in the Middle East and North Africa who do not have a bank account. Add the tens of millions more who have accounts but lack access to credit, insurance, investment products, or basic business banking infrastructure, and you are looking at a financially underserved population that is larger than the United States. This is not a peripheral market. It is the defining fintech opportunity of the next decade.
At Sooiv Capital, fintech is our single largest investment category by both portfolio count and capital deployed. This piece explains why we believe the MENA fintech opportunity is both massive and undercapitalized, what specific verticals we are focused on, and what we look for in the founders we back.
Understanding the Scale of the Problem
The financial exclusion numbers in MENA are staggering, but they do not tell the full story. Three structural factors make this exclusion unusually addressable by technology — and unusually valuable to address.
Demographics Drive Adoption
The MENA region has the youngest population profile of any major economic region outside Sub-Saharan Africa. Approximately 60% of the population is under 30. This demographic cohort is mobile-first, skeptical of traditional banking institutions, and open to digital-native financial services in a way that older populations in more financially developed markets are not. In markets like Egypt and Jordan, smartphone penetration already exceeds 70%, and mobile internet usage rates among young adults are comparable to Western Europe — even in populations that have never held a bank account.
This creates an unusual dynamic: you can reach the unbanked population of MENA through mobile channels almost as easily as you can reach the banked population of Germany. The infrastructure for distribution exists. What has been missing is the regulatory framework, the local product design, and the trust-building that turns digital financial services from an aspiration into a daily habit.
The SME Infrastructure Gap
MENA's 25+ million small and medium enterprises collectively process hundreds of billions of dollars in annual transactions, but the financial infrastructure serving them ranges from inadequate to nonexistent. Most SMEs in Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, and even the Gulf states manage their working capital through informal channels — family networks, trade credit from suppliers, cash float management — because formal banking products designed for their size and risk profile simply do not exist.
This is not a credit risk story. It is an infrastructure story. The cost of serving an SME customer through a traditional branch-based banking model is prohibitively high relative to the ticket sizes involved. Digital infrastructure changes this economics entirely. A fintech company that can serve an SME customer through a mobile application at 5% of the cost of a branch-based bank can price its products to be profitable at loan sizes and transaction volumes that traditional banks cannot touch.
Regulatory Tailwinds
The regulatory environment for fintech in MENA has transformed dramatically in the past four years, and it continues to improve. The Dubai International Financial Centre's FinTech Hive, established in 2017, has created the most sophisticated regulatory sandbox environment in the region and has enabled dozens of fintech companies to develop, test, and license products that would have required years of regulatory navigation in a conventional banking framework. Saudi Arabia's SAMA (Saudi Central Bank) launched a dedicated regulatory sandbox in 2018 and has issued fintech licenses to over 80 companies since then. Egypt's Financial Regulatory Authority has implemented a progressive open banking framework that is explicitly designed to enable fintech competition with incumbent banks.
These regulatory environments are not perfect. But they represent a genuine commitment by regional governments to use fintech as a tool for financial inclusion and economic development — and they create a tailwind for well-designed fintech businesses that did not exist five years ago.
The Four Verticals We Are Most Focused On
1. Embedded Finance for SMEs
Our highest-conviction fintech investment theme is embedded finance infrastructure for SMEs. The opportunity is to build the financial operating system for MENA's tens of millions of small businesses — integrating payment acceptance, working capital lending, treasury management, and business banking into a unified platform that can be accessed through existing business software workflows.
Fawri Pay, our portfolio company in Amman, is executing on this thesis. Their unified API gives MENA's SMEs access to payment acceptance, short-term working capital, and basic treasury management through a single integration. In their first six months of operation, they processed over $12M in transactions and acquired 1,200 SME customers — growth rates that reflect both the depth of the market need and the quality of the product. Their recent Series A term sheet, received less than twelve months after our seed investment, validates the commercial model.
We are actively looking for additional companies in this space, particularly those focused on specific verticals — retail, logistics, healthcare — where the financial workflow is deeply integrated with the operational workflow and the switching cost from an embedded solution is high.
2. Consumer Lending and BNPL
Buy-now-pay-later has had a complicated global history. In MENA, however, the underlying economics are more favorable than in most other markets, for a simple reason: the absence of consumer credit infrastructure means that BNPL is not competing with existing credit products — it is creating the category from scratch.
The BNPL opportunity in MENA is particularly strong in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Morocco, where e-commerce penetration is growing rapidly but credit card penetration remains below 20%. Companies that can build credit assessment models using alternative data — telecom records, utility payments, e-commerce purchase history — rather than traditional credit bureau scores have a genuine first-mover advantage in a market where the credit bureau data is thin to nonexistent.
3. Remittance and Cross-Border Payments
MENA is the world's largest remittance corridor by volume, driven by the 25+ million migrant workers employed in the Gulf states who send earnings home to Egypt, Jordan, Pakistan, India, the Philippines, and beyond. The World Bank estimates that over $60B in remittances flows through MENA corridors annually — at an average cost of 5.5%, representing over $3B per year extracted from workers and their families through transaction fees.
Blockchain-enabled and mobile-first remittance companies are attacking this cost structure aggressively. We have been watching this space closely and are evaluating several companies whose approach to the corridor optimization problem represents genuine innovation rather than incremental improvement on the Western Union model.
4. Islamic Finance Infrastructure
The global Islamic finance market is valued at over $3.5 trillion and serves a community of approximately 1.8 billion Muslims worldwide — the majority of whom are in MENA. Despite its scale, Islamic finance remains poorly served by digital infrastructure. Most Sharia-compliant financial products are still delivered through manual processes and legacy banking systems that were not designed for them.
The opportunity to build digital-native Islamic finance infrastructure — Sharia-compliant savings products, sukuk investment platforms, halal BNPL — represents an enormous greenfield opportunity. This is an area where MENA-native knowledge is not merely helpful but essential: the regulatory interpretation, the Sharia advisory relationships, and the customer trust required to build credible Islamic finance products are deeply local advantages that no global fintech company can replicate from the outside.
How Fawri Pay Exemplifies Our Investment Approach
Our decision to invest in Fawri Pay illustrates the specific combination of factors we look for in MENA fintech companies. The founding team — Ahmed Al-Khalidi, who spent eight years in corporate banking, and Sara Haddad, who led API development at one of Jordan's largest software companies — represents the precise technical-commercial blend we require. Neither a pure banker nor a pure technologist would have been sufficient. The problem Fawri Pay is solving requires deep understanding of both the financial product requirements of SME customers and the API integration challenges that determine whether those products actually get used.
Jordan was not an obvious choice for an embedded finance startup. It has a smaller market than Egypt or Saudi Arabia, a more conservative regulatory environment, and a smaller pool of risk capital. But the Fawri Pay founders chose Jordan deliberately: they understood the regulatory environment, had existing banking relationships, and recognized that a smaller, more manageable market was the right place to prove the model before scaling to larger Gulf markets. This strategic clarity about market entry — starting where you have structural advantages, not where the market looks biggest on a spreadsheet — is exactly the kind of thinking we back.
"MENA fintech is not a question of whether the opportunity exists. It is a question of whether you understand MENA well enough to design products that actually work for MENA customers — and whether you have the relationships to navigate the regulatory environments that determine whether those products can be distributed. For founders who have both, there is no better market in the world right now."
— Omar Al-Rashidi, Partner, Sooiv Capital
What We Look For in Fintech Founders
Fintech is a category where pedigree matters — but not in the way most founders think. We are not looking for ex-Goldman Sachs bankers who want to disrupt their former employers. We are looking for founders who have deep operational knowledge of the specific financial problem they are solving, whether that comes from banking, from running a business that experienced the problem firsthand, or from engineering the infrastructure that existing financial products run on.
Beyond domain expertise, we weight four factors heavily:
- Regulatory literacy: MENA financial regulation is complex, varies significantly by country, and changes frequently. Founders who treat regulation as an obstacle to work around rather than a constraint to design for almost always fail. We want founders who have already engaged with the relevant regulators, understand the licensing landscape, and have a credible compliance strategy from day one.
- Credit model sophistication: If your business involves lending — which most embedded finance businesses do — your credit model is your core competency. We want to see evidence that you have thought rigorously about alternative data, about the specific default risk profiles of your target customer segment, and about how you will build a model that improves as you accumulate proprietary payment and behavioral data.
- Unit economics clarity: Fintech businesses can hide poor unit economics behind growth metrics for years. We require a clear CAC/LTV model with realistic assumptions before we invest, and we hold founders accountable to those assumptions through board engagement.
- Banking partnerships: The most efficient go-to-market for MENA fintech is almost always through a banking partnership that provides the license infrastructure and customer trust that a new brand would take years to build. Founders who have already established banking partnership conversations before fundraising are significantly more attractive than those who plan to build their own regulatory infrastructure from scratch.
The Decade Ahead
We are at the beginning of a ten-year cycle in MENA fintech. The regulatory infrastructure is in place. The demographic tailwinds are strengthening. The capital is beginning to arrive. The companies that establish dominant market positions in embedded SME finance, consumer credit, and cross-border payments in the 2024-2027 window will compound those advantages for the decade after that.
If you are building in MENA fintech, we want to hear from you. The market is real, the timing is right, and the founders who understand the MENA context deeply enough to build products that actually work here — not adapted from a San Francisco playbook, but built from scratch for the realities of Cairo, Riyadh, and Amman — are the founders who will define the next chapter of financial services in one of the most important economic regions in the world.