Egypt's Paymob Begins UAE Expansion To Serve SMEs
One of the leading payment platforms across the MENA region, Paymob, has begun its next expansion phase in the region. The platform will be launching its services in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
The UAE has become a hotspot for startups across the region. this can be due to its diversity, business-enabling policies, and networking accessibility amongst others.
Paymob was co-founded by Alain El Hajj, Mostafa Menessy and Islam Shawky in 2015. The platform was developed as an infrastructure technology outlet that provides payment tools such as mobile wallets payment, or any other form of digital payment tools.
The fintech has an omnichannel gateway that provides about 40 payment techniques which have empowered more than 150,000 SME operators, helping them scale and manage their initiatives and also giving them access to unique financial services.
In the middle of 2022, Paymob launched in Pakistan. In May 2022, the startup announced its success in raising a Series B funding round of US$50 million. The Series B round is going to be of prominent help in its expansion to the UAE.
In its new location, the fintech hopes to serve SMEs and micro businesses, making its digital payment tools and services available across the seven Emirates.
While explaining why the startup chose the UAE, co-founder Shawky said “The UAE is a dynamic ecosystem that fosters entrepreneurship and innovation, largely enabled by tremendous support from the public sector. There are currently over 400,000 businesses in the UAE, 61 per cent of which are microbusinesses and 38 per cent are SMEs. We see a massive opportunity to serve this market segment and our goal over the next three years is to empower 15 per cent of those merchants with the latest payment technologies to fuel their growth and further digitise the economy.”
Expanding its product services, and expansion into emerging markets was one of the plans the fintech had mentioned it will be embarking on when it raised the Series B round.