In the Cairo suburb of 6th of October, a street vendor uses a Fawry point-of-sale terminal to accept bill payments from neighbours who have never had a bank account. That same terminal, and the data it generates, is now the foundation of something considerably more ambitious. Fawry for Banking Technology and Electronic Payments S.A.E. — the company behind Egypt’s most ubiquitous payments network — reported net profits of EGP 3.1 billion ($62m) for the year ended 31 December 2025, up from EGP 1.75 billion ($35m) the prior year. But the headline number, striking as it is, understates the significance of what is actually happening inside the business.

But buried within is the outline of a company systematically building a second, and potentially larger, business on top of its payments rails: consumer and microfinance lending.

KEY NUMBERS AT A GLANCE

Source: Fawry consolidated financial statements, 31 December 2025. Conversion: 1 EGP = $0.020 USD.

The payments engine is firing — but the real story is elsewhere

Transaction services and collection fees remain the core of Fawry’s business, generating EGP 6.22 billion ($124.4m) in revenue in 2025, up from EGP 4.41 billion ($88.2m) the prior year. This 41% growth in the core payments segment reflects the continued formalisation of Egypt’s previously cash-heavy economy, accelerated by a Central Bank of Egypt push to broaden digital financial inclusion.

Yet the faster-growing line in the income statement tells a different story. Interest revenue from microfinance and consumer lending surged from EGP 943 million ($18.9m) in 2024 to EGP 2.17 billion ($43.4m) in 2025 — a 130% increase in a single financial year. This segment now accounts for 25% of total revenues, compared with 17% the year before, a shift in composition that is accelerating with each passing quarter.

The loan book underlying this income grew from EGP 2.96 billion ($59.2m) to EGP 5.48 billion ($109.6m) — an 85% expansion — spread across both microfinance and consumer credit portfolios operated through Fawry’s subsidiary structure. That growth rate, maintained over a twelve-month period, is not incremental experimentation. It is a deliberate strategic expansion.

Why the payments network makes this possible

The strategic logic behind Fawry’s lending push is not complicated, even if the execution is. The company has spent fifteen years building a distribution network that reaches into communities and income segments that Egyptian banks have largely not served. At the end of 2025, it reported contingent liabilities in the form of letters of guarantee totalling EGP 3.71 billion ($74.2m) — more than double the EGP 1.85 billion ($37m) reported the prior year — which reflects the depth and scale of its biller and institutional relationships.

That network gives Fawry something lending-only fintechs spend years trying to acquire: customer trust, transaction history, and physical reach. 

The practical execution of this idea sits inside Fawry Micro Finance, which holds a 99.99% stake by the parent, and Fawry Consumer Finance, which is 100% owned. Together, these subsidiaries hold the lending portfolios. The parent company provides the distribution rails and the brand.

Fawry seems to have understood this with its new securitisation programme

Tucked in toward the end of the 2025 report, Fawry describes a securitisation portfolio transfer agreement signed in May 2025 with Capital for Securitisation Company.

Under the agreement, the company completed the first tranche of a securitisation bond issuance with a total value of EGP 497.5 million ($9.95m). That first tranche is described as the opening instalment of a programme with an expected total volume of EGP 8 billion ($160m) over three years, ending in May 2028.

The significance of this is structural. A company that holds loans on its own balance sheet must keep raising capital to fund each new loan it makes. A company that securitises — that bundles loans and sells them to capital markets investors — can recycle that capital and originate new loans without proportionally growing its own balance sheet risk. The economics of lending change fundamentally. Fawry moves from being a lender to being a loan originator and servicer, with the attendant fee income that model generates.

If the programme reaches its EGP 8 billion ($160m) target, it would represent one of the more significant capital markets innovations in Egyptian fintech to date, and would provide the funding mechanism for an even more aggressive lending expansion than the balance sheet currently suggests.

The credit risk question that the numbers raise

The loan book expansion does not come without risk, and the financial statements contain signals worth examining carefully. Provisions for customer financing risk — the money set aside to cover expected loan losses — jumped from EGP 161 million ($3.2m) to EGP 350.4 million ($7m) in 2025. That is a 118% increase in provisions against an 85% increase in the loan book, meaning provisioning grew faster than lending.

The ageing analysis of the microfinance portfolio, disclosed in the notes on financial instruments, shows that while the majority of the book is current, the 91 to 120 days past due bucket carries an expected credit loss provision rate of approximately 53% — meaning that loans overdue by three to four months are considered more than half-impaired. That is a high severity assumption, and may reflect either conservative modelling or genuine early evidence of credit stress in parts of the portfolio.

The total customers financing risk provision at year end stood at EGP 221.3 million ($4.4m), up from EGP 161 million ($3.2m) at the start of the year. The balance was formed in accordance with requirements set by the Financial Regulatory Authority. Whether this provision is sufficient as the book continues to scale at pace is a question that analysts and investors will reasonably ask.

What the software acquisitions reveal about longer-term intent

In the first quarter of 2025, Fawry acquired a 51% controlling stake in CodeZone L.L.C., a software design, applications, and training company. The acquisition generated EGP 58.8 million ($1.18m) in goodwill — a figure that exceeded the EGP 31.4 million ($628,000) cash consideration paid, implying that management attributed significant strategic value to CodeZone beyond its tangible assets.

CodeZone joins Dirac for Information Systems — a regional business digital transformation software provider in which Fawry holds 51.2% — and Codezone itself in a nascent but discernible pattern: Fawry is building or acquiring software capabilities that sit above its payments infrastructure and that could be sold to the businesses and institutions that are already clients of its payment network.

The financial statements do not articulate this as an explicit strategy. But the combination of enterprise software subsidiaries, a payments network with deep biller relationships, and a growing lending business begins to resemble, in its early architecture, the kind of integrated financial services platform that has generated durable competitive advantages for companies such as Ant Group in China and Paytm in India — with the significant caveat that execution in Egypt will face its own specific regulatory, macroeconomic, and infrastructure constraints.

This analysis is based entirely on Fawry for Banking Technology and Electronic Payments S.A.E.’s audited consolidated financial statements for the year ended 31 December 2025, audited by Saleh, Barsoum & Abdel Aziz (Grant Thornton Egypt) and approved by the board of directors on 4 March 2026. Currency conversions at 1 EGP = $0.020 USD. Fawry did not provide additional comment for this analysis.