Nihal Abughattas
It’s no secret that I’m a strong believer in open banking and open finance. Lately, forum after forum, the conversation keeps circling the same tension: a huge gap in access to credit on one side, and the fear of a default-driven bubble on the other. And I keep coming back to the same question: what could open finance mean for Egypt? This isn’t a policy paper, and I don’t pretend to have all the answers. This is my point of view, and me thinking out loud about home.
Over the past few months my feed has been full of the same argument. Consumer finance in Egypt is either a bubble about to burst or a success story being unfairly attacked. Banks argue that lending is shifting to companies with worrying standards. Fintechs say banks never wanted those customers anyway.
What almost nobody says out loud is that the whole fight comes down to information. Lenders are making decisions about people they can barely see, while the data that would let them see clearly sits in wallets, telco systems and bank cores, untouched.
We have more digital financial data than ever, and we still underwrite a lot of people with an ID card and a guarantor.
You could see this as a young market going through growing pains, or as a regulator moving quickly to keep pace. Probably a bit of both. What stands out to me is that every one of these steps shares the same goal: helping lenders see borrowers more clearly. OTP checks, real-time I-Score, behavioural scoring. Each is a real step forward. But for now they’re fragmented, and what we still need is something that connects them.
In plain terms, open banking means I can tell my bank to share my account history with another licensed company over a secure connection, and take that permission back whenever I want. Open finance stretches the same idea to wallets, loans, insurance, payroll and even tax records, in some markets.
The plumbing is already here. InstaPay connects every bank and wallet in the country, and most of us use it without thinking. What we don’t have is a rule that lets data travel with the customer, plus the one condition that would get banks to agree: reciprocity. If you take data from the system, you put yours back in. Without that, a bank opening its APIs is just handing its book to competitors, and a finance company can keep its late payers to itself.
Your onboarding probably involves asking customers to upload bank statements and hoping nobody edited them, or spending months negotiating an integration with one bank at a time. With proper APIs you’d get a year of real cash flow in a few seconds. You would also have to get licensed, get audited and share your own data. If that sounds like too much of a burden, it’s fair to ask whether you’re building a lender or a lead-generation business.
Be honest about what your scorecard sees today. For a lot of customers it’s an ID, a guarantor, maybe a payslip, and a branch officer with a monthly target. Now picture seeing that a tuk-tuk driver in Fayoum gets around EGP 600 into his wallet six days a week and has paid his electricity on time for three years. You’d lend to him without a second thought. Picture seeing that the next applicant is already paying three instalment plans with your competitors. Real-time I-Score is a good start, but it only shows loans. It doesn’t show income, and plenty of defaults begin with income nobody really checked.
But think about what you can’t see today. Your salary customer might have a busy wallet, two instalment plans and a BNPL line somewhere else, and all you see is the payroll credit. Reciprocity changes that. You already have the cheapest money in the market. For the first time you’d also have the information to lend it to the gig workers and micro-merchants you’ve been leaving to others. The banks that treat this as compliance will hate every minute of it. The ones that see it as distribution could end up funding half the ecosystem.
If you work informally, most lenders can’t see you. If they can see you, it turns out your data can be used without your knowledge; just ask the parents at that New Cairo school. Years of paying bills and rent through a wallet would finally count for something, and you could take that record to whoever offers the best price. The catch is that consent must be real: short, in Arabic, and easy to revoke or withdraw. Not a 14-page PDF and an “I agree” button.
Small businesses are estimated to make up around 80% of GDP and three quarters of private-sector jobs. Yet the US development agency DFC puts their financing gap at $39 billion, with only about one in five reporting any access to credit. To be fair, the CBE has pushed hard here and says MSME lending is up roughly 409% since 2015. But banks still ask for the two things small businesses rarely have: a credit history and collateral.
Think of a bakery in Shubra taking a few hundred wallet payments a day. It’s a solid business that barely exists on paper. With its collections data, it could borrow against what it actually sells. Here’s the part I find most interesting: if clean records get you cheaper credit, registering your business stops feeling like a tax and starts looking like an advantage.
Brazil is the comparison I keep coming back to. Big, cash-heavy, a large informal sector, and a central bank that launched instant payments (Pix) first and then built open finance on top. Five years in, it has about 155 million active consents and more than 100 million connected accounts. Credit originated through the system reached R$31 billion by September 2025, and since February this year Brazilians can move a personal loan to a cheaper lender inside the same framework.
We already have our Pix. It’s called InstaPay. The next step is still ahead of us.
Look at where consumer credit goes today: more than 30% of consumer finance spending is on appliances and electronics. But it does tell you credit flows to what’s easiest to underwrite, not to what grows the economy. Better data lets lenders price the harder, more productive stuff, like working capital for a workshop.
Some of the most inspiring work in Egyptian finance today is happening here. Fintechs are building their own scorecards for people banks never looked at, and platforms are lending to their own drivers and merchants. These efforts are genuinely changing lives. But each one stays inside its own company’s walls, so a delivery rider’s track record on one app means nothing to the next lender. Imagine what happens when that work no longer has to be rebuilt company by company. With open finance, the same idea can reach not thousands of people, but millions.
Some of these pioneers may worry that open finance hands their hard-won advantage to competitors. I’d argue the opposite. Today each of them pays a lot just to see a customer: field agents, document checks, one-off integrations, and the losses that come from lending on thin information. Open finance brings those costs down, which makes every loan cheaper to make. And what they’ve built doesn’t disappear. The data becomes shared, but the skill to use it doesn’t. Their models, their understanding of these customers and their head start stay theirs, now applied to a much bigger market.
It also gives regulators something they don’t have: a view of total household debt across banks, non-banks and wallets. And every informal worker who builds a credit history has a reason to stay in the formal system, raising the thresholds of real financial inclusion.
Add it up and, as I see it, it’s hard to find someone who loses. Borrowers get fairer prices and credit that reflects the lives they actually lead. Small businesses get working capital based on what they sell, not what they own. Lenders spend less to find and assess customers, and lose less to bad loans. Regulators finally see the whole picture. And the economy gets credit flowing to the places that create jobs, from a workshop in Mahalla to a delivery rider in Giza.
And banks? I’d argue they have the most to gain. They already hold the deposits, the cheapest funding, the trust and the scale. What they’ve been missing is visibility into the informal economy and the speed to serve it. Open finance gives them both. Instead of competing with every fintech and finance company, they can fund them, partner with them, and lend directly to customers they couldn’t assess before. Better data means better-priced loans and fewer surprises in their books. The pie gets bigger, and banks are best placed to take the biggest slice.
That balance matters.
Data alone won’t fix this. But with the right framework and supervision, Egypt doesn’t have to choose between widening access to credit and protecting against a bubble. We can do both. And the millions of Egyptians already running their financial lives through their phones have waited long enough to be seen.
Written by Nihal Abughattas, General Manager, Global Market Expansion. To speak to Nihal further about open finance opportunities in Egypt and beyond, get in touch.
Open banking revenue models are the commercial frameworks banks use to generate income from their open banking infrastructure, beyond the regulated minimum of free API access for licensed third parties. Regulation sets the foundation. What a bank builds above that base, and how it prices it, is what determines whether open banking becomes a cost...
Phoebe Singer
Los bancos argentinos llevaban tiempo esperando saber qué les exigiría concretamente el esquema de Finanzas Abiertas (Open Finance). Esa espera concluyó con la emisión del Decreto 353/2025 en mayo de 2025. En la práctica, este decreto ubica a la Argentina en la misma senda regulatoria que los regímenes de Open Banking a nivel internacional. Aunque...
Fabio Caldeira
The Next Phase of KSA Open Banking Under the leadership of the Saudi Central Bank (SAMA), the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia continues to advance its Open Banking Framework as a core component of Vision 2030’s digital transformation agenda. Following the rollout of Account Information Services (AIS), the market is entering its next critical evolution: Payment...
