When Ahmed Sabbah, co-founder of the troubled mobility startup Swvl, launched Telda in 2021, the vision was deceptively simple: a P2P payment app for Egypt’s unbanked population. Teaming up with fellow ex-Swvl engineer Youssef Shalqami, Sabbah pitched Telda as a digital wallet that let users send, spend, and save without ever needing a traditional bank account. But four years on, Telda’s business model has veered sharply off that original path.
What’s kept the company afloat while others from its founding generation have faltered? A strategic embrace of regulation — not as a constraint, but as a moat.
Telda’s recent acquisition of a custodian licence — approved by Egypt’s Financial Regulatory Authority (FRA) — is the latest move in a calculated shift toward deeper integration with Egypt’s formal financial system. In doing so, Telda isn’t just surviving Egypt’s volatile fintech terrain; it’s building a foundation that could enable it to dominate it.
The Custodian Bet
A custodian is a financial institution that holds assets — stocks, bonds, cash — on behalf of clients, ensuring safety, regulatory compliance, and transaction processing. In Egypt, such licenses are typically granted to trusted financial intermediaries servicing pension funds, insurance companies, mutual funds, and sovereign wealth portfolios. The FRA’s decision to allow Telda Holding for Financial Investments to operate as one signals a high degree of institutional trust.
For Telda, the implications are significant. A custodian licence dramatically increases the scale and types of financial assets it can handle, bringing it closer to the operational latitude of a full-fledged digital financial institution.
By contrast, other fintechs have struggled under Egypt’s rigid regulatory landscape. Sabbah’s former Swvl co-founder Mahmoud Nouh, for instance, raised over $30 million for Capiter — only for the startup to collapse within a year amid governance and liquidity concerns. Sabbah’s edge has been patience and positioning. Rather than bypass the state, Telda has embedded itself into its regulatory framework.
From Card Issuer to Fintech Conglomerate
Telda’s regulatory journey has been deliberate. It started with approval from the Central Bank of Egypt (CBE) to issue cards and onboard users digitally. After months of silence following its $20 million seed round led by Sequoia Capital and Block (formerly Square), skeptics wondered if the startup had hit a licensing wall. Sabbah denied any friction with the CBE, insisting instead on a long game of compliance and iteration.
The long game appears to be working. In March 2025, Telda acquired City Capital, a licensed brokerage firm. The move gave Telda access not only to existing EGX (Egyptian Stock Exchange) infrastructure but also a shortcut past the bureaucratic slog of applying for a fresh brokerage licence. Days later, the FRA granted Telda Securities Brokerage the authority to operate fully using financial technology.
Now, Telda has positioned itself as Egypt’s first unified digital platform offering card issuance, P2P transfers, payments, and retail stock trading — all within one mobile app.
By integrating its services under a single user interface, Telda is reducing the friction that has long limited retail participation in Egypt’s capital markets. In a country where over 60% of people remain outside formal banking channels, and cash still dominates more than 90% of transactions, Telda’s seamless UX aims to remove every possible hurdle.
Telda CTO Youssef Shalqami has framed the City Capital acquisition as “just the beginning,” hinting at upcoming services potentially involving savings products, mutual funds, or even embedded insurance — all housed within Telda’s walled financial garden.
Hisham Ibrahim, Managing Director of Tilda Holding, which oversees the company’s expanding non-banking financial portfolio, stated plainly: “This is part of our broader ambition to become a comprehensive destination for all non-bank financial services using tech.”
Building in the Moat
The custodian licence now completes a regulatory trifecta: central bank compliance for payments, stock market access through brokerage, and now legal authority to hold client assets on behalf of institutions. While other fintechs compete on UX or rewards, Telda is building defensibility where few others are looking — in legal architecture.
It’s a shrewd move in a country where the state retains enormous gatekeeping power over financial innovation. Egypt’s FRA and CBE have been cautious but increasingly pragmatic in licensing fintechs, especially as the macroeconomic outlook darkens and the government looks to expand formal financial inclusion.
The strategy has attracted sustained backing. Sequoia Capital remains a believer. So too do Block and Global Founders Capital. The 2022 seed round was one of the largest in Egypt at the time, and Telda’s investor list reflects not just capital confidence but geopolitical interest in Egypt’s emerging fintech scene.
Telda’s evolution is also a case study in fintech adaptation across emerging markets where regulatory friction can kill momentum as quickly as a funding shortfall. Sabbah has acknowledged the tough lessons: early versions of the app were stripped down, and public rollout was delayed for months while licensing details were ironed out.
“In MENA, our competition is not traditional banks — it’s cash,” Sabbah said in an earlier interview. “This is the hardest competition to face.”
It’s also the most important one to win. Telda’s bet is that by embedding itself into every possible financial touchpoint — via payments, savings, investments, and now custodianship — it can become the default interface for money in Egypt.
If it succeeds, Telda won’t just have navigated Egypt’s regulatory landscape. It will have rewritten the fintech playbook for building trust, scale, and survival in North Africa’s most populous market.
What’s Next?
With 500,000 active users and over $300 million in processed payments as of last year, Telda is no longer a startup in stealth. It is quickly becoming the first-mover in regulated fintech integration across the Egyptian ecosystem.
Its custodian licence opens the door to B2B services such as asset management and institutional fintech, while its consumer-facing app continues to expand financial access. As regulatory winds shift in Egypt and the broader MENAP region, Telda’s strategy may offer a blueprint for others navigating similar terrain.
In an environment where many startups are forced to pivot away from bold ambitions, Telda’s pivot has been in a different direction: deeper into the system, not away from it. That may just be the reason it’s still standing.