About Ahmed Wadi
Ahmed Wadi, founder and CEO of Money Fellows, has stated that the company now launches new savings groups each month equivalent to one billion Egyptian pounds in new funds. He said the company has acquired around nine million clients to date)Skip, with close to one million active clients. Wadi noted that Money Fellows secured a $13 million funding round and that the company’s total funding has reached $60 million, attracted from foreign investors including development banks and governments. He said the company plans to invest in developing new products and reducing default risk.
Wadi has described Money Fellows as a platform that digitizes the traditional rotating savings and credit association (ROSCA) model, which he said is used by an estimated 2.4 billion people globally. He stated that the company launched a prepaid card product in early 2025)Skip, and that Money Fellows entered the Central Bank of Egypt’s experimental fund regulation, describing it as the only company to do so and now in the exit phase toward an actual license. Wadi has said the company was founded in 2017, started in the UK, and moved to Egypt in 2018. He has also discussed the challenges of building a startup in an unregulated market, stating that early investors faced a high risk of losing their money.
Source: AI-verified profile updated from Ahmed Wadi's recent appearances.
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Transcript (9 segments)
A
Ahmed Wadi0:00
What are you guys really promoting about yourselves here today at Fintech Con? We are finishing up with our Series C round, so we are looking for a little bit of investors, and since this is very fintech specific, we are looking for potential partners because a lot of pay related startups here are related to compliance and stuff like that. So we are looking mostly for M&A as well.
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Interviewer0:27
And what is it that you guys are actually providing? What's your solution?
A
Ahmed Wadi0:33
So we're digitizing the ROSCA model. It's a very famous rotating savings and credit association, and it's very common in over 89 countries and communities around the world. This model is actually 2,000 years old and still exists today after 500 years of traditional banking. So this model, there are 2.4 billion people doing gross cut around the world to save and lend money together instead of approaching banks and getting credit or saving money with high interest rates or no access to credit. So what we're doing is digitizing this to take it from the offline world to the modern digital world today to help people access interest-free credit and reach saving achievements powered by just their social network, not their credit score. We are like a marketplace of helping people do money circles together.
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Interviewer1:24
So what they do is form a group of peers through their social network? Let's say a group of 10 people all contribute €100 every month into the pot, and at the end of every month, one of them gets the thousand out of it.
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Ahmed Wadi1:41
Yeah. So this way people access credit without relying on a credit score but rather on their friends and family. Those towards the end of the circle are forcing themselves to save.
I
Interviewer1:56
Where do you see the future of the whole fintech market?
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Ahmed Wadi2:00
There's a lot of disruption down the road, definitely. There's a lot of things related to connections, like decentralizing the bank, making instead of having a big monopoly in banks, there are a lot of small P2P lending startups. We are doing savings and lending to groups, and there's a lot of disruption going on in blockchain. So basically the infrastructure of the bank itself is slowly changing. I think fintech is very, very new, and in the very near future it will be huge in India. Stuff like these kinds of events will help them.
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Interviewer2:48
And actually, how we see fintech has gone back to the old days and bringing the principles of banking, breaking down everything, the complex big system into simple stuff that people used to. That's pretty much what we do.
A
Ahmed Wadi3:04
Yeah. I was at TechCrunch as well, but they were not as focused as Fintech Con. Here, everyone you meet is a potential partner or someone who's really specific to fintech. So I think that gives you more value for your time than a general event. So this is pretty good.
