Visa positions Egypt at the center of its CEMEA mobile-first strategy

Egypt’s soft POS rollout is landing in a broader Visa regional shift toward mobile-first infrastructure. The Central Bank of Egypt (CBE) approved the full rollout of soft POS in February and lifted the EGP 600 cap that had hobbled its two-year pilot, “paving the way for a truly mobile-first economy,” Visa’s Egypt Country Manager Malak El Baba told EnterpriseAM at the time.

Cashless transactions in Egypt were already up 45% y-o-y through year-end 2025, per the CBE, but cash still runs 60-70% of transactions here — well above the 50% average across the broader CEMEA region Visa serves.

Visa is treating Egypt as the operational test of its mobile-first push. At the Visa Payments Forum in Paris last week, the company’s leadership presented a roadmap that positions phone-as-POS technology as the fix for the roughly 90 mn small businesses across the 85-country CEMEA region that still don’t accept Visa. “Visa Accept,” the product that turns a phone into a POS device, spares merchants the bank visit and the multi-week wait for machines, CEMEA Regional President Tareq Muhmood told the forum.

Cash has fallen from roughly 70% of transactions before the pandemic to about 50% today across CEMEA, Muhmood said, with Visa-accepting locations growing from 11 mn to 21 mn in three years. Visa has also recently carved out an Egypt-Libya-Sudan subregion — a structural signal that the company sees Egypt as one of the sharpest growth opportunities in its regional footprint.

Localization is the operational strategy. Walter Lironi, the head of Visa’s value-added services for CEMEA, told us the only real competitor Visa has in the market is cash. “Everything else is ’a partner.’ Visa’s acceptance platform now clears Meeza, Egypt’s national scheme, alongside Visa; the toolkit is modular — maybe in Egypt you select functionality one, two, three, in the UAE... four, five, six,” and even Instapay, the instant account-to-account network sometimes cast as a threat, is treated as coexistence because Visa now sells services across rails it does not own.

The nine revolutions

Then there’s the harder question of what payments will look like a few years out. Visa’s leadership described a payments landscape being reshaped by roughly nine technology revolutions running simultaneously — including generative AI, agentic commerce, stablecoins, and blockchain. Group President Oliver Jenkyn opened the forum with a note of warning: “If you aren’t a little bit confused, you aren’t paying attention.” He counted the revolutions running at once and observed that any one of them would define a generation. “We’ve got like nine of them happening at the exact same time.”

Jenkyn reintroduced Visa as a company organized around three business drivers: consumer payments (the card-tap C2B business, where there are still tns of USD of cash and checks left to convert), commercial money movement solutions (targeting the far larger flows between every other counterparty, including person-to-person, business-to-business, and government-to-consumer), and value-added services (customizable, AI-enabled tech solutions Visa offers clients making build-versus-buy decisions on stalled modernization projects). Visa has been increasingly focused on the third driver, particularly in emerging markets.

Agentic commerce, stalled

The headline act is agentic commerce — but we’re not quite there yet. Rajat Taneja, Visa’s technology president, framed the shift as commerce moving “from humans in the loop to intelligence in the loop and the job of the network shifting from securing the payment to securing intent because someone else is representing you.” Agentic commerce, in Jenkyn’s walkthrough, means handing a shopping agent three things: a tokenized payment credential, a data token of your purchase history and preferences, and a set of controls (which merchants and what limits). The agent then shops on your behalf.

Adoption has been slow. Visa Intelligent Commerce was unveiled a year ago, but a recent Visa study of 6k consumers across 17 countries showed that while 84% of consumers use agentic tools as part of their shopping, that’s mainly for research or discovery, not for purchasing. “Agentic commerce is stalled a bit right now because the web was built for humans. It has colors and pictures and fonts and pop-ups built to entice humans to buy. Bots don’t want any of that. So the error rate is very high if an agent tries to buy on the human web,” Jenkyn said. The industry is addressing new protocols, standards, and APIs, but there’s a second obstacle beyond the technical: humans need to get comfortable with agents shopping on their behalf, and that will take a minute.

Blockchain and stablecoins

Blockchain and stablecoins are still in the early stages of development, Jenkyn said. “By taking cryptocurrency and backing it with fiat currency, you’re translating what was historically a speculative asset class and converting it into something that has the potential to be part of the core infrastructure of the global payments and money movement ecosystem.” He sees Visa playing a role in bridging the gap between the crypto/stablecoin world and the fiat currency world — particularly in emerging markets with volatile currencies.

What does this mean for the region?

The roadmap above assumes a digital-first consumer, which describes a small portion of the 85-country region Visa calls CEMEA. When asked if an agentic, stablecoin future risks widening the gap between developed economies and markets in the Middle East and Africa, Taneja said he doesn’t see it that way. “I think the technologies can scale very rapidly and reach people cheaply on their phones.”

The room for growth is significant — and it’s in Egypt, where the mobile-first infrastructure is only just becoming legal. The CBE soft POS approval that opened this piece is the regulatory unlock, with Visa Accept as the operational fix, and the Egypt-Libya-Sudan subregion carve-out serving as the structural play. What comes after that — agentic commerce, stablecoin-linked cards, blockchain-based cross-border flows — depends on whether the phone-first foundation being built now scales fast enough to catch the next revolution.

Is Visa still a card company five years out, or an invisible infrastructure? “The evolution from a physical card to a credential, to a token will continue. We’re a company that provides the foundation of trust,” Taneja said. “It’s difficult to predict what things will look like a year from now, much less five years from now, but one thing you can predict with some level of confidence is what will be constant. In order for any of the things that we’re talking about today to happen, the constant will be a foundation of trust. If you have that foundation, everything else will fall into place.”