Mounir Nakhla on MNT Halan's high-RPM expansion into Turkey, the UAE & Pakistan
📅 Dec 16, 2025What I Did Next9 MIN10 VIEWS34 SEGMENTS · 2 SPEAKERS
Last week, Mounir Nakhla told me about his entrepreneurial journey with MNT Halan, and how the company has risen to become of the Africa’s fastest growing start-ups. On this bonus episode, Mounir talks to me about the strategy behind their recent expansion into 3 new territories — Turkey, the UAE & Pakistan.
Watch my full conversation with Mounir here: • Mounir Nakhla
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Chapters:
0:00 On this episode...
5:12 Consolida...
Questions asked in this interview
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0:28How do you ensure that you have that grassroots power in those other countries?
5:11Considering you've had three in a very quick succession, right?
5:33I mean, being at the forefront of this industry in Egypt, you must be working hand in hand with the government to create regulations for the industry. How does that partnership work?
6:18Are you thinking more along the lines of just maturing some of these markets and waiting and seeing how the next opportunities appear?
This episode is brought to you by EFG Hermes 1, your one app for investing in more than 35 stock markets worldwide. Welcome again to What I Did Next from ENT Media. I'm Malak Foued. Last week, Mounir Nakhla told me about his entrepreneurial journey with Halan and how the company has risen to become one of Africa's fastest growing startups. On this bonus episode, Mounir talks to me about the strategy behind their recent expansion into three new territories: Turkey, the UAE, and Pakistan.
When you expand abroad like you've expanded in Pakistan and in Turkey, how do you do that? How do you physically become present in all these places? Obviously, you partner with people, but the knowhow you have in Egypt is so ingrained and inbuilt. How do you ensure that you have that grassroots power in those other countries?
In Pakistan, we acquired a micro finance bank and the configuration of the country and the economy is similar to Egypt. Even the culture is similar to Egypt. So I sent a lot of expertise from Egypt that do not speak English, that only speak Arabic, and they managed to work with people who are translating. The CEO of the bank worked with us here for a few years and then there's a lot of the technology that we transferred, a lot of the strategy, a lot of the loan products, pricing, risk measures, etc. So there's a lot of cross-pollination of expertise that were transmitted and we stabilized it. It was a turnaround story and I think they're extremely underbanked.
We closed the transaction 18 months ago and we started working on it a year earlier.
The UAE now we disperse loans to north of 150,000 people. We launched that product that's 100% digital with all the technology made in Egypt. The tech office is here. The integrations are here. So everything is done from here. And this is a brilliant story. So we laid the groundwork. It's a green field. So we started from nothing. Established a company.
No, no, no, no, no. We have our UAE managing director, CEO of the UAE business, but he's getting a lot of support from Egypt. And why was the UAE considered a good market for you?
It's a big market in terms of unsecured lending. There is huge earned wage access. There's a huge opportunity to service the pink and blue collars, the expats who are not usually served, and we thought that this was a good opportunity. Still unbanked. We're talking about people who are still unbanked.
Yes. Turkey was through an acquisition also. We're extremely happy with our investment in Turkey. The management team see eye to eye, similar culture. I feel it's just like brothers that we haven't known since our childhood.
Nakhla, M. (2025, December 16). Mounir Nakhla on MNT Halan's high-RPM expansion into Turkey, the UAE & Pakistan [Interview transcript]. What I Did Next. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/567368/
MLA
Mounir Nakhla. "Mounir Nakhla on MNT Halan's high-RPM expansion into Turkey, the UAE & Pakistan." What I Did Next, 16 Dec. 2025. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/567368/.
BibTeX
@misc{nakhla2025_567368,
author = {Mounir Nakhla},
title = {Mounir Nakhla on MNT Halan's high-RPM expansion into Turkey, the UAE \& Pakistan},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, What I Did Next. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2025},
month = {dec},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/567368/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
