In the marble-clad offices of Cairo’s financial district, Valu has spent the past year celebrating a milestone few Egyptian fintechs have reached: a listing on the Egyptian Exchange, 71 per cent revenue growth and a net income surge of 81 per cent to E£764m ($14.9m). The company, which began life in 2016 as the Middle East and North Africa’s first buy-now-pay-later platform, now serves 901,000 activated customers, has extended E£20.9bn ($407.5m) in loans and commands a 23 per cent share of Egypt’s consumer finance market.
Yet hidden in the 80-page annual report lies a riddle that cuts to the heart of Valu’s identity as a champion of financial inclusion. Two separate data tables, placed almost 20 pages apart, give starkly different accounts of the company’s lending to Egypt’s unbanked millions.
In the risk and compliance section, Valu reports that in the first nine months of its 2025 financial year it served 307,000 unbanked customers, generating E£6.64bn ($129.4m) in gross merchandise value. By the end of the full year, the sustainability section records 344,000 unbanked customers — 37,000 more — but unbanked GMV of just E£3.5bn ($68.2m), a near-halving of the earlier figure. Transactions supposedly fell from 2.38m to 1.36m over the same period.
The company provides no footnote, reconciliation or explanation for the E£3.14bn gap. It is a mathematical impossibility for a full-year number to be smaller than a nine-month figure unless a prior metric has been restated or an error has been corrected. For a newly listed company, the silence is conspicuous.
“The unbanked numbers are central to Valu’s pitch to investors and regulators,” said a Cairo-based analyst who asked not to be named. “If those metrics have been recalculated, the market deserves to know how and why. Without clarity, the financial inclusion narrative wobbles.”
Financial inclusion has been Valu’s most powerful marketing tool and a cornerstone of its environmental, social and governance commitments. Walid Hassouna, founder and chief executive, wrote in the annual report that the company’s mission was to “make financial solutions available where customers already are” and to “support underserved and underbanked segments.” Chair Fatma Lotfy told shareholders that “access to reliable financial solutions is more important than ever.”
Egypt remains a vast, largely untapped market for credit. The World Bank estimates that roughly two-thirds of the country’s 110m population lacks a bank account, while private sector credit to GDP hovers at about 30 per cent, one of the lowest ratios in the Middle East. For a platform such as Valu, which uses machine-learning models to underwrite customers without traditional credit histories, that translates into a potentially enormous growth runway.
The business has delivered on many of its commercial promises. Gross revenue climbed to E£5.62bn ($109.5m) in the year to December 2025, while the cost-to-income ratio, stripping out credit losses, improved from 37.7 per cent to 31 per cent. Asset quality, a perennial anxiety in consumer lending, held up: the non-performing loan ratio ended the year at 0.98 per cent, one of the lowest in the Egyptian consumer finance industry. Return on average equity reached 39.3 per cent, supercharged by a balance sheet carrying debt of 4.44 times equity.
These numbers, however, are the product of a delicate alchemy. Valu funds itself through a combination of bank facilities, factoring lines and an ambitious securitisation programme that had completed 20 transactions worth a cumulative E£19.9bn ($388m) by year-end. That allows the company to recycle capital rapidly, but it also means a substantial portion of the loan book sits off-balance sheet. Should credit losses spike — a risk never entirely absent when lending to borrowers with scant banking history — the capital cushion could erode quickly.
The unbanked segment illustrates the tension between mission and margin. Valu’s overall approval rate for credit applications in 2025 was 47.8 per cent. For unbanked customers, it was 40.63 per cent. The lower approval rate suggests a deliberate attempt to screen out the riskiest applicants, but it also implies that reaching the unbanked is costlier and that a significant proportion of would-be borrowers are turned away. The average ticket size and duration of unbanked loans are not disclosed.
A further layer of ambiguity surrounds the fintech operating licence that Valu obtained from Egypt’s Financial Regulatory Authority in March 2025. The licence permits fully digital onboarding, including eKYC and e-signatures, which could dramatically lower the cost of acquiring unbanked customers. In September, Valu embedded that capability inside Noon, a regional e-commerce platform, completing what it called the “first licensed BNPL transaction in Egypt conducted through digital onboarding.” The promise is that technology will eventually make unbanked lending as profitable as the rest of the book. The data discrepancy, however, makes it difficult to judge whether that promise is already being fulfilled or remains aspirational.
Valu’s predicament is not unique. Across emerging markets, fintechs are grappling with the economics of lending to populations that have been locked out of the formal banking system. High inflation — consumer prices in Egypt rose more than 30 per cent year on year for much of 2024 and 2025 — makes interest-rate setting treacherous. The Egyptian pound’s sharp depreciation has squeezed household incomes, potentially elevating default risks for marginal borrowers.
For now, investors appear willing to give Valu the benefit of the doubt. The company’s shares, listed via an in-kind dividend distribution from its parent EFG Holding rather than a conventional initial public offering, have traded within a relatively narrow band. Amazon, which converted an option into a 3.95 per cent stake at the time of listing, has signalled confidence in Valu’s commercial model. The platform’s diversification into prepaid cards, auto financing and an in-app marketplace, Shop’IT, is designed to reduce its reliance on the core BNPL product and to deepen customer relationships.
Nevertheless, the gap in the unbanked data remains an open wound. A company that asks shareholders to trust it with billions of Egyptian pounds of their capital must also ask itself whether it can trust the numbers it publishes. Valu’s fight for Egypt’s unbanked may be its greatest growth story. It could also, if the data cannot be reconciled, become its biggest liability.