Meet XPay, The Egyptian Fintech Company Making Payments Easier for 18,000 Users

Paying your university fees, club membership, or sports training, must have been a hassle at least once in your life. Taking the time out of your day just to make that dull visit to a bank or any entity, and waiting for your turn which can last a few good hours during peak times can be a waste of time and money.

Today’s technology is taking over almost every part of our lives, and paying bills for your entire family is not an exception.

XPay, an Egyptian startup that offers Fintech solutions for payment and management of communities, was only founded in April last year, and today it serves 18,000 users. Egyptinnovate’s team had an interview with Mohamed Abdel-Mottaleb, a Managing Partner at XPay, and he told us the story of the company, how they attracted investors, and their plans for expansion to dominate markets in other countries.

What is XPay’s Impact?

On average, any family provider loses 27 business days per year to carry out their payments, XPay saves the users’ time. Also when their kids don’t have to carry cash within communities that use XPay, So they don’t have to worry about losing money, or not taking change, or paying EGP 50 instead of EGP 5.

From the administrators' side, XPay allows them to collect their cash on time easily through the XPay app and avoid the loss caused by the late payments. “There are many members who live abroad, they don’t pay for 3 or 4 years then pay all fees at once. With such an app, they can finish all these payments immediately,” explained Abdel-Mottaleb.

What are the challenges that you face?

Legislations and getting committed employees that want to learn are the two biggest challenges. You don’t find the required caliber, the needed experiences with the required commitment.

Some laws cause many challenges for us. The central bank announced some laws a few weeks ago that really ties us to banks which are slow. I want to run; to wait for the bank to get orders from the central bank can hold us back for months. As a startup, we cannot afford a few months.

I don’t see the other fin-tech startups as a challenge, we shouldn’t be competing against each other, we’re all competing with cash. All of the fintech companies don’t represent 5% of the cash transactions in Egypt. We still have 95% of the transactions to fight for.

What is your story with attracting investments?

We got our first investment from EFG Hermes in May 2018 for USD $30,000. The competition was fierce. 30 companies out of 3000 got the investment, and after the first stage, we had to achieve specific KPIs to get the follow-on investment. Gratefully, we’re one of the 15 companies that got a follow-on investment.

Later on, we got a small investment of in-kind services from Womena, which saved us around $50,000. Then we got investment from Pride Capital and RainMaking which is saving us another USD $350,000.

And last May, we secured an investment of $250,000 from two angel investors.

What are your plans for expansion?

By the end of the year, we want to have 200,000 users. There are communities that have thousands of members. It may sound like a big number, but with our policy and with our strategy, we can reach it quickly.

And we’ll spread out of Egypt. We haven’t decided yet where exactly, probably we’ll head towards Africa more than the gulf, but this isn’t based on research, it’s just my personal opinion. We’re not ready to do this research today, we’ll do it by the end of the year to decide where we’ll go.

What do you consider your greatest achievement?

Until now, all the people that we’ve got in the company are excellent. The team has 8 members now, in January it was only 2 people, so we’re growing quickly, I see that this is our greatest achievement. We outsource the accounting and legal work to other offices.

What is the team’s background?

I am a professor of Nanotechnology, but XPay is my fourth company, I have been in the entrepreneurship scene since 1993. We have many people working with us who actually don’t have college degrees, some of them are managers and team leaders. They got into university a year or two, then they decided that they won’t continue and they taught themselves. They are wonderful young people.

What advice would you give to aspiring entrepreneurs?

Don’t try to think that you’re the smartest person, especially with investors and clients. They’re smart just as your are. Let things go smoothly, and with transparency. Be clear about the steps you want to take