Egypt's Financial Sector Achieves Massive Digital Growth

Mohamed Amer, Acting Assistant Governor of the Central Bank of Egypt (CBE), announced that the Bank's digital transformation efforts, utilizing advanced technological solutions and AI, have propelled individual financial inclusion rates to 76.3% by June 2025, a significant increase from 27.4% in 2016, marking a growth exceeding 214%. During the same period, financing portfolios directed to SMEs saw a 395% increase. These achievements, he noted, position Egypt at the forefront of global digital finance.

Digital Infrastructure Milestones
Amer highlighted major breakthroughs across the banking sector, including the success of online and mobile banking services, which now serve approximately 18 million subscribers and processed 114 million transactions worth EGP 11.7 trillion in 2024. Key successes by June 2025 include:

Meeza National Card System: Issued over 43.5 million cards.
Instant Payments Network (InstaPay): Exceeded 16 million users, conducting over 1.1 billion transactions valued at EGP 2.4 trillion. Meeza Digital Mobile Wallets: Contributed to a total of 55.5 million e-wallets, executing 1.4 billion transactions worth over EGP 1.8 trillion.

Contactless Mobile Payments: The launch of card-tokenisation enabled services like Apple Pay (Dec 2024), which recorded over 40 million transactions worth more than EGP 32 billion, with Android tokenisation currently underway.

CBE’s Strategic Focus: AI and FinTech
Speaking at the PAFIX conference, Amer stressed that digital transformation is now a strategic imperative for growth and efficiency. The CBE is advancing a comprehensive digital strategy, including the implementation of the electronic Know Your Customer (eKYC) project to establish a national digital financial identity. Recognizing FinTech as the main driver of change and AI as the "secret ingredient," the Bank launched its FinTech and Innovation Strategy in 2019.

Initiatives supporting this strategy include:

A behavioral credit-scoring model developed with I-Score, utilizing AI-driven machine learning and alternative data to expand access to finance. The development of advanced SupTech systems for real-time monitoring and evidence-based decision-making to enhance the supervisory framework.

Human Capital Development and Entrepreneurship
The CBE has prioritized developing the workforce through several initiatives: FinYology Programme: Encouraging university students to develop FinTech concepts, involving 30+ universities and 19,000 students.

Digital Academy: Egypt’s first specialized digital training academy.

Bachelor’s Degree in Banking Sciences: A new applied educational track launching in the 2025/2026 academic year.

In supporting the entrepreneurship ecosystem, the CBE established the regulatory sandbox for safe testing of FinTech solutions, backed the Nclude Fund for investments, and implemented the Rowad Al-Nil initiative to provide technical support to entrepreneurs and SMEs.