Coffee With: Walid Hassouna (LinkedIn), CEO of fintech giant Valu. Back in the days of Covid, everyone was very worried, but Valu had the best growth. Hassouna headed the NBFI at the time, and his message to the board of EFG Holding was that it was time to grow, and more importantly, that it would be the most inexpensive time to grow.

In a way, 2023 and 2024 were great for Valu despite interest rate hikes and inflation. Not because of the interest rate hikes, but because people were thinking, “should I buy now or should I buy later?” — and everyone decided to buy now because there was the risk of scarcity of products, and there was the risk of massive price increases. And those who bought things in 2023 and 2024 didn’t regret it.

And 2025 has been a pretty eventful year for the fintech player, which is 24 hours away from making its trading debut on the EGX. The fintech player currently has around 800k active customers, who are concluding 16k transactions a day — double the amount of transactions it was seeing in 1Q 2024. It closed 1Q 2025 with a 25% market share of Egypt’s consumer finance market.

EnterpriseAM sat down with Hassouna to learn more about the listing, the firm’s growth strategy, and what else it has in the pipeline for a two-part interview. Edited excerpts from our conversation, below:

EnterpriseAM: What was your vision when you founded Valu in 2017?

Walid Hassouna: We built Valu on two pillars — the first was to reduce friction and make it easier for many more people to access credit. And for that to happen, we needed to be able to do it with less documentation and faster processing. We don't guarantee our clients will get the loan, but we guarantee they’ll get an answer in five to ten minutes.

E: That was new at the time.

WH: It was disruptive to the extent that some financial institutions, some banks, were very much against us. They were concerned about the change we were bringing to the market. We were lucky enough that we had the support of the Central Bank of Egypt and the Financial Regulatory Authority, which allowed us to go ahead with our plans.

E: You said there were two pillars. If speed was the first, what was the second?

WH: We wanted to transform into a payment method. That’s why we always try to avoid the word “installment.” We use the word “pay” — “Pay with Valu” — not “installment.” True, you can pay us in as few as one month or as many as 60, but at the time the purchase is made? That’s the key: “Pay with Valu.”

E: Why is that distinction so important?

WH: Paying is different. Whether in the Arab world, in the West, or even in the US, you take a loan maybe once a year? We want our customers to use us to pay every single day.

And it’s working. As we speak today, we are running 11 transactions per minute, or 16k transactions per day — this time last year, the comparable figure was 7k transactions per day, so we’re growing at about a 100% clip in terms of the number of transactions per day.

Our prepaid card processes 4-5k transactions daily, making it the fastest-growing prepaid card in Egypt, despite being available only to approved customers.

That was the plan — offer finance with less friction, less documentation, a fast turnaround, and then change it into a payment method. Today, we’re the fourth-largest payment scheme in the country, behind Mastercard, Visa, and Meeza.

E: What’s profitability like on a standalone basis?

WH: We’re growing all of our KPIs 100% year-on-year — we managed to do this and remain profitable. We've been profitable since 2020, when we had EGP 8 mn on the bottom line. We were in the EGP 20 mn range in 2022, we hit EGP 230 mn in 2023, and we turned in a net income of EGP 420 mn last year. We wanted to grow, but it wasn’t VC-backed “growth at any cost.”

E: How do you keep your competitive metabolism high in this market?

WH: A major differentiator between us and our competition is that we have a very young, bold, and innovative team. They’re not afraid to bring big ideas to the table and figure out how to make them work. Whatever works, we roll it out. Whatever doesn't work, we roll it back. Additionally, we’re well-backed by EFG Holding and have a nice corporate parent.

We created what is effectively the first cash loan product in Egypt offered by a consumer finance company, aligning with regulatory guidelines while meeting market needs. While consumer finance regulations traditionally focus on product and service financing, we innovated within this framework by introducing a unique approach — reverse consumer finance. Customers can now purchase items, upload their receipts via our app, and receive funds directly into their accounts. This innovative model has since inspired similar offerings in the market, demonstrating its value and effectiveness.

Another innovation is our consumer-to-consumer car finance product. I can sell you my car, and Valu comes in the middle to finance the transaction without the dealership in the middle. It’s a six-month-old product and represents 50% of our car sales. We’re doing more than EGP 350 mn in auto loans monthly, half of which is consumer-to-consumer through our Shift program.

E: What’s the growth strategy going forward?

WH: If growth, profitability, and innovation are the first half of our story, the second half is breadth. We want to do everything from the USD 1 transaction to the USD 1 mn transaction. We want people to use their Valu card to top up their mobile phone credit, and we’re also seeing them use our app to buy yachts.

Think of it in the same terms that Uber does. Everyone has the same Uber app, but you can decide if you want an Uber Bus, an Uber Pool, UberX, or Uber Black. It’s the same thing with Valu — everyone has the same app, and you decide what you want to do with it.

E: I think the conventional wisdom in the industry was to have a sector-specific focus?

WH: We received a lot of criticism of our strategy from people who said we must focus on specific segments. By going broader, we effectively hedge our risk. In 2023-2024, if we had not had very big tickets with very affluent clients, we would have faced many issues because everyone was struggling at the bottom of the pyramid.

E: If you're looking for USD 1 to USD 1 mn? Who is your center of gravity?

WH: Our center of gravity is always people between the ages of 25 and 35. Those are our bread and butter. We have a program that starts financing people at the age of 16 — the only program in Egypt that finances people who are not graduates yet. The reason we want those people to be part of our portfolio is that it's very inexpensive to bring those guys on board and you build a lifelong relationship with them.

Young people really want to be part of the financial ecosystem. They want to build their credit score — Gen Z and Gen Alpha really care about that. And we have a mission to underwrite the unbanked. What truly sets us apart is that 40% of our customer portfolio had never borrowed a penny before partnering with us. This highlights our genuine commitment to expanding financial inclusion and reaching those who have historically been underserved.

E: How has that impacted your non-performing loans?

WH: We take pride in our robust underwriting practices, which have consistently delivered exceptional results. With non-performing loans at just 0.7% and a cost of risk at 0.9%, our performance speaks for itself. When we hear unfounded rumors, like claims of having a 20% default rate, it’s hard not to laugh.

Our figures are out there. Our segment reporting with EFG Holding is there. We have been applying IFRS 9 and a credit-loss model since 2020. And we’re tightly regulated by the FRA — do you think they would tolerate a 20% default rate, let alone me saying we have a 0.7% default rate if that wasn’t the case?

That's why we currently use our platform to offer underwriting as a service. We underwrite the co-branded card with Bank Next, which is also part of EFG Holding Group. And we have two other banks in the pipeline that want us to work for them, underwriting a service. So, this is going to be totally off our balance sheet. I can’t say right now which banks these are, but this segment is very important to our margins — it’s a high-margin segment.

** Part II of our conversation with Walid Hassouna will be out in tomorrow’s issue to coincide with Valu beginning trading on the EGX. Watch this space.

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