Fawry's bill-payment rails bet: 2008 to a 30x IPO, 1.9B transactions, EGP 8.65bn revenue

Fawry operates Egypt's national bill-payment and e-payments network: utility, telecom and government bill collection through 225,000+ retail agent service points, plus banking services, micro and SME lending, prepaid cards, insurance and the myFawry app.

That Egyptians would switch cash bill-payment to an electronic network — agents, kiosks, mobile. A network that wasn't everywhere wasn't a payments rail.

Pre-IPO backers included Actis, Banque Misr and National Bank of Egypt; the 2019 offering sold 36% of capital for up to EGP 1.6bn (~$97M), with EFG Hermes as manager.

Ashraf Sabry founded Fawry in 2008 to build Egypt's first nationwide electronic payments network. The premise was that a payments network is only useful if it is everywhere, so Fawry deliberately spanned ATMs, mobile wallets, kiosks, online portals and retail agents rather than serving smartphone owners first.

Fawry grew to 225,000+ service points and 30M+ registered users, winning the World Finance Banking Technology Award (2017) and the Middle East Technology Excellence Award (2019). It listed on the EGX in August 2019 with an IPO oversubscribed 30.3x that priced at EGP 6.46 and jumped 29% on debut, then rode Egypt's digital-payments shift: FY2024 revenue grew 68.4% to EGP 5.51bn on 1.93bn transactions, and the business diversified beyond bill payment into banking services, lending and the myFawry app.

Still scaling: FY2025 (reported 2026-03) revenue rose 57% to EGP 8.65bn with net profit up 79.8% to EGP 2.89bn, throughput of EGP 943.6bn, and a Soft POS rollout following the Central Bank's February 2026 launch.

Sabry chose ubiquity over app-first: a payments network only works if it reaches everyone, so agents and kiosks mattered as much as mobile.

Fawry built on the most painful, high-frequency cash transaction — bills — giving agents a reason to sign up and users a reason to switch.

It treated regulators as partners, which let it expand progressively from bill payment into banking, lending and insurance under institutional confidence.

The 2019 IPO gave Fawry permanent public scale and data, and the pandemic-era digital shift compounded its head start.

Fawry's edge was ubiquity before apps: a payments network is only as good as its last-mile reach, so it built cash-accepting agents, then layered banking on top of that trust and traffic.

As of March 2026, Fawry is Egypt's largest digital-only financial services platform and still scaling: FY2025 revenue EGP 8.65bn (+57%), net profit EGP 2.89bn (+79.8%), EBITDA margin 57.4%, throughput EGP 943.6bn, gross loan portfolio EGP 5.7bn (+82.6%) and 2.7M prepaid cards (+172%). It is rolling out Soft POS after the Central Bank's February 2026 launch, operating BNPL for Business with 120,000 small merchants, a money-market fund above EGP 7bn NAV, and AI-assisted development; the founder's next stated frontier is embedding AI personalization and an LLM chatbot across customer channels.