CEO & Founder, MoneyFellows
Interview with Ahmed Wadi Founder & CEO of Money Fellows at Seamless North Africa 2024
In this exclusive interview at Seamless North Africa 2024, Mark Walker, Editorial Director at our media partner The Fintech Times, ...
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.
Transcript (18 segments)
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Mark Walker0:02
Hi, my name is Mark Walker and I'm the editorial director of the Fintech Times, and we're here at Seamless North Africa. I'm going to start off by asking my interviewee to introduce himself to you, the audience.
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Ahmed Wadi0:13
Hi, I'm Ahmed Wadi, founder and CEO of MoneyFellows.
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Mark Walker0:19
Fantastic. So just for people that don't know, what is MoneyFellows? What do you do and how long have you been around?
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Ahmed Wadi0:26
MoneyFellows has been around since 2017. We started in the UK and then we moved to Egypt and launched in 2018. What we do is basically we're offering lending, saving, planning at much better rates and incentives, and we're using ROSCAs, which is a very ancient traditional model, rotating savings and credit associations known as different names around the world, where people basically pull money together and chip in a fixed monthly installment, and one person gets the whole pot at the end of every month. So this is another alternative way of how people have always been banking, in a way, even way before banks and credit scores existed.
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Mark Walker1:12
I guess that sort of everyone putting money into a pot used to happen with an actual pot, and people would put their pounds in it and then give it out at the end of the month.
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Ahmed Wadi1:21
Absolutely. There are so many ways how people actually manage building this mechanism. It's usually done completely offline with friends, family members, work colleagues. It's very painful to be honest. There's usually a volunteer that runs after people to collect the money, there are a lot of scams, and so on. So despite it being over an $800 billion market and over 100 years old, it's still being done the same old hard way. And that's why we thought, okay, we need to do something about it and digitize this model, make it a lot easier for people to find relevant circles for their needs and to be able to access credit and good saving options as well.
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Mark Walker2:08
And I guess as you said, you launched here in Egypt in 2018, so you've been here for a long time. How have you seen fintech develop over that period of time? Was there a particular point where it was a really high moment?
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Ahmed Wadi2:24
Yeah, so I think when we first came to Egypt, it was very, very tough to even accept digital payment, which is a very basic need for any tech company, not just fintech. But I think in no time, especially post-COVID and during COVID, things have picked up significantly, whether on a governmental initiative basis or other fintechs and other tech companies building this or changing this mindset of using financial services online, using online payments, adopting and signing up for prepaid cards and wallets, mobile wallets, and so on. In no time, in the past probably four or five years, I think the number of people with digital acceptance channels has probably quadrupled.
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Mark Walker3:18
And I think as you say, there's been a real sort of explosion of digitalization right from the government side of things, right the way through the whole sort of change, another fintech as well. And that's why people are now accepting the concept of using digital services at first and then even fintech, which is a bit more sensitive. So people are becoming now more aware, more comfortable to actually use those kind of services.
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Ahmed Wadi3:43
And I think we've always been focused on providing a very good user experience so that we focus a lot on retention and word of mouth. So if we get a very few number of people to love the service enough, they would actually keep using us and get their friends and family. And this is how I think credibility of services is being built, not just by marketing campaigns and so on. So we've been very focused on that and I think we've been doing well.
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Mark Walker4:14
I think that obviously as you said, you started in London, perhaps in Europe. The trust of the financial institutions was lost quite a long time ago, and so fintech was kind of automatically accepted because they didn't trust their banks anymore. One of the things I found quite a bit in the GCC region is that banks still hold most of the trust. So do you find it more challenging for fintechs to gain that trust?
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Ahmed Wadi4:41
No, so in GCC I think it's a bit different. In developing countries like Egypt or emerging markets generally, I think this trust of formal financial systems isn't that big. And it's probably a different reason why Europeans don't trust the banks. So I think in Egypt, they connect things like taxation, they don't understand banks, they don't know where the money is going to or where it's coming from, so they're not really able to. So there's a lot of education that needs to be done so people can actually start understanding how those institutions work and start building trust. So I think we've been doing well with financial inclusion lately, but generally you'd find at least 50% of the population underbanked or unbanked, and I think there's a long, very long way to still go. And I think we as a company and other companies are actually supporting that thesis. We, for example, are using a very ancient tradition especially those people are used to do, and that's how they usually bank in the offline world, and we're bringing it online. So this is another way of financially including them using a use case they always knew about, they always trusted, understood, and we're just improving it and enhancing the overall experience of it.
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Mark Walker6:07
And I guess thinking about, obviously we're here at Seamless North Africa looking at everything new and exciting. What are you seeing as kind of the new emerging trends within fintech generally, technology or fintech in Egypt?
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Ahmed Wadi6:21
I think they're not globally new, but I think the instant payment network, the open banking concept, is actually starting to pick up. I think there's a huge adoption to this instant payment, InstaPay they call it. I think this has been really, really successful. I think there's a huge plan from the Central Bank of Egypt to enable other companies to white label that solution and start opening up the open banking concept through that platform. So I think this is a very exciting initiative that we're very much looking forward to. I think there has been a lot of wallet-related, mobile, bill payments, so I think this market is actually becoming very saturated by a lot of fintechs and so on. So I think on the payment side, things are really looking very well. There's also a very new initiative, a digital bank approval coming up very soon, and one of the largest banks in Egypt is about to launch the first digital bank in Egypt. So this is also a game changer, I believe. And with that, there will come a lot of infrastructure-related initiatives like eKYC and digital signatures and onboarding, which is going to help most of the digital companies and fintechs onboard their customers without that operational hassle of having to physically meet and sign and so on.
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Mark Walker7:55
And then perhaps my final question: what sort of things here at the conference are you most looking forward to?
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Ahmed Wadi8:02
To be honest, it's always good to meet most of the relevant people to fintech, whether banks, regulators, and other players. So it's always good to have them all under one roof and network and catch up. And we've been looking to partner with a few of the people that are actually present here today, so it's good to catch up with them all in one place.
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Mark Walker8:29
It's an absolute pleasure to spend time with you. Thank you very much for joining me. This is Seamless TV, powered by the Fintech Times.
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Ahmed Wadi8:34
Thank you, it was a pleasure. Thanks.