HyperPay's full-payments bet: Saudi gateway to licensed cards and wallets

Payments infrastructure for businesses across MENA: online card gateway, wallet and e-money services, payouts, invoicing and fraud management, now extending into SME commercial card issuing — HQ Riyadh with offices in seven more markets.

That a licensed full-stack provider would beat a pure gateway as cashless grew — so HyperPay moved into wallets, e-money and issuing with Mastercard.

$36.7M (SAR 138M) raised in 2022 in a round led by Mastercard, with Amwal Capital Partners and AB Ventures participating.

Muhannad Ebwini founded HyperPay in Saudi Arabia in 2014 as a payment gateway for online websites. By 2022 it was headquartered in Riyadh with offices in Amman and Dubai — most of its team based in Amman — and press coverage described a fast-growing gateway offering payment processing, invoicing and risk and fraud management to support small businesses.

In May–June 2022 Mastercard led a $36.7M round with Amwal Capital Partners and AB Ventures, with the money earmarked for expansion into Egypt, Qatar and Oman and for growth beyond payments. According to COO Marwan Ibrahim, HyperPay then shifted strategy in late 2023: from online payment gateway to a broader provider of digital payment solutions for companies across the region. In January 2025 the Saudi Central Bank (SAMA) licensed HyperPay's Saudi entity to run digital payment services via an electronic wallet, and in September 2025 Mastercard announced the two companies would issue commercial cards in Saudi Arabia — later the UAE and Qatar — adding that HyperPay had received electronic-money institution license approval.

Still independent and scaling: in November 2025 the company said it processes over $2.5B in transactions monthly for more than 17,000 clients, with offices in the UAE, Bahrain, Qatar, Lebanon, Egypt, Iraq and Jordan and plans to keep expanding — while its new wallet and commercial-card lines are only just beginning to roll out.

Gateway services are interchangeable and priced by volume, so HyperPay needed to own more of the payment stack — wallets, e-money and cards — to build margin and defensibility.

Mastercard's equity gave HyperPay what a gateway cannot buy alone: a network relationship that later deepened into co-issuing commercial cards across Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar.

Licensing is the moat: SAMA's January 2025 e-wallet license and the electronic-money approval moved HyperPay from a merchant-services vendor into a regulated payments institution.

The pivot is measured but not proven: $2.5B in monthly volume and 17,000+ clients show the base, while wallet adoption and card issuing will decide whether the full-stack bet was right.

A payment gateway is a thin, priceable layer between merchants and banks; the durable move is to climb toward licenses, wallets and issuing — a climb only regulators and network partners can open.

As of 18 November 2025 HyperPay is live, independent and founder-led under CEO Muhannad Ebwini, processing over $2.5B monthly for more than 17,000 clients, with offices in the UAE, Bahrain, Qatar, Lebanon, Egypt, Iraq and Jordan. Its licensed push — SAMA's e-wallet license (January 2025), electronic-money approval, and the Mastercard collaboration to issue SME commercial cards in Saudi Arabia, then the UAE and Qatar — is announced but not yet fully rolled out. The open question is whether full-stack payments will earn margins that pure gateway processing never did.