Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to a new month that’s starting once again with us collectively holding our breaths.
The regional war may be looking at another halt with US-Iran negotiationssetto resume today, US President Donald Trump said, without confirming a deadline for an agreement. Trump said he called off a planned strike against Iran, characterizing it as the “biggest attack since World War II.” Iran’s state media reported that Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi spoke with Saudi and Pakistani officials to coordinate diplomatic efforts.
No news is, for now, the good kind of news — and it gives us room to talk shop. In this morning’s Lede, we dig into the cross-border regulatory maze that fintech players across the region have to navigate, and how it’s one of the biggest brakes on regional expansion.
*** A QUICK PROGRAMMING NOTE- A couple of times per year, we take a few days of publication breaks to recalibrate and work ahead on exciting new things. EnterpriseAM MENA+ will be taking that summer publication holiday starting this Friday, 7 August and will be back in your inboxes on Monday, 17 August at our usual time. –Salma
When an Egyptian buy-now-pay-later company decides to expand to the Gulf, it usually arrives convinced the hard part is behind it, and the cross-border expansion will help boost business (and bring in FX). The market is bigger, the customers are richer, the region shares a language and a religion, and its experience back home proves the business works. Then it meets the regulator.
“What companies typically do not realize is the multiplicity of jurisdictions and the fact that their FRA license carries no portability whatsoever,” Mohammed Essam Sid-Ahmad, partner and head of corporate and M&A at Matouk Bassiouny UAE, tells EnterpriseAM. “They are starting from zero.”
The region is routinely sold as a single, surging market, with the “big three” of Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Egypt producing household names like Tabby, Tamara, Fawry and Halan. What that framing obscures is that MENA is not one market at all. It is a set of walled gardens. There is no passport, no mutual recognition, and no shortcut. Every border a fintech crosses, it crosses from scratch.
Three regulators who don’t recognize each other
The wall is regulatory before it is anything else. Egypt licenses non-bank consumer finance through the Financial Regulatory Authority (FRA); Saudi Arabia through its central bank, SAMA; the UAE through the Central Bank of the UAE (CBUAE), plus separate freezone regulators in the DIFC and ADGM. None of them carries over the licensing granted by the others.
“There is no mutual recognition agreement, no passporting regime, and no bilateral arrangement,” Essam says. A track record with a well-regarded regulator earns goodwill in the next application — “regulatory comfort, not legal recognition,” as he puts it — but it does not reduce the substantive requirements or speed up the process. A Gulf company entering Egypt must incorporate a fresh Egyptian joint-stock company and apply for an FRA licence on its own merits. An Egyptian company entering the UAE faces the CBUAE’s Finance Companies Regulation, where the fintech-friendly Restricted License route alone demands the higher of AED 20 mn (USD 5.45 mn) in capital or 5% of outstanding lending — against roughly EGP 75 mn (USD 1.49 mn) under the FRA. Same region, same activity, a fresh application every time.
The hidden fault line
The deeper divide is the degree to which Shariah factors into fintech regulations. In two of the “big three” countries, Shariah compliance is not a requirement. The third operates entirely on Shariah.
Egypt runs almost entirely on conventional rails. Of roughly 50 consumer finance companies in the market, only three or four offer Shariah-compliant products, Amr Sultan, co-founder and CEO of Egyptian lender Blnk tells us — and the market has grown fast anyway. Part of the reason, Sultan says, is a fatwa from Al Azhar holding that consumer finance is by its nature a Shariah-compliant activity. “Most of the customers view conventional banking products as Islamic,” he says. “Accordingly, there’s no significant demand for Shariah-compliant products.” In Egypt, the Shariah label is a feature almost nobody asks for.
Saudi Arabia is the opposite. There, Shariah compliance is effectively mandatory — digital consumer finance products carry a Shariah-compliant stamp from the central bank as a matter of law. That asymmetry is what turns a marketing question in Cairo into a structural obstacle at the proverbial border. An Egyptian fintech built on conventional products — interest, conventional late fees — cannot simply carry them into the Kingdom.
How big an obstacle this all is depends on the product. Sultan, whose company is not currently prioritizing Gulf expansion, frames a hypothetical entry into Saudi as manageable: “Some product features will likely be changed, but I wouldn’t consider it a rebuild.” Essam, who has to build the machinery, describes a heavier lift for any firm that has never operated under Sharia governance. “You cannot design a product conventionally and then ‘convert’ it at the end,” he says. Interest and penalty charges have to be eliminated; the CBUAE requires an internal Shariah supervisory committee, a Shariah compliance function and an internal Shariah audit, all approved by the Higher Shariah Authority. His estimate to stand all of that up from zero is nine to 18 months, on top of the licensing itself — a combined path that can run past two years.
Pure BNPL may be the exception. Sultan draws a sharp line between true “pay-in-four” BNPL — zero interest, zero fees, the provider paid by merchant rebates — and longer-tenor consumer finance that carries interest. Pay-in-four “invites itself to the Shariah-compliant kind of setup,” he says, because there is nothing to purify. The products that struggle to crack into Saudi Arabia are the interest-bearing ones.
The asymmetry — and the door that just closed
It is materially cheaper for a Gulf fintech to move into Egypt than for an Egyptian fintech to move into the Gulf. Cairo’s cost base — capital, salaries, office space, advisory fees — is a fraction of Dubai’s, and a Gulf entrant holding hard-currency capital converts favorably into EGP. Crucially, a Gulf firm doesn’t need to build Shariah infrastructure for Egypt, because the FRA doesn’t require it unless the company markets the Islamic label. The traffic, on cost logic, should run south.
Except the door south just slammed shut. The FRA has been intermittently suspending new microfinance and consumer finance licenses, and recently introduced new requirements for all consumer finance loans. The license suspension applies regardless of the entity’s origin. Applications already in progress are still moving through, Essam says, but a fresh applicant — a Tabby or a Tamara eyeing Egypt today — “will not be able to submit fresh applications without explicit approval from the FRA, which is not easy to obtain.” The one direction that made economic sense is, for now, administratively closed.
So what does the boom actually mean?
None of this means regional fintech isn’t growing at breakneck speed in each market. But the tidy story of a borderless regional boom is one that the regulators aren’t on board with — at least not yet. The expansion that is happening is slower, costlier and more one-directional than the headline numbers suggest, and the single biggest variable is whether a company can get through a licensing door that, in the region’s largest consumer market, is currently bolted.
Lebanon and Iraq are each pushing anti-corruption drives against elites previously thought beyond reach. Lebanese authorities rearrested former Banque du Liban (BDL) Governor Riad Salameh at a hospital north of Beirut on Saturday, after he skipped a court appearance on an unverifiable medical excuse. Days earlier, an Iraqi court recovered IAD 20 bn (c. USD 15 mn) in a corruption case — the latest seizure in a nationwide sweep that has, unusually, pulled in sitting MPs and senior officials across the political spectrum.
In Lebanon, the pursuit is climbing the banking establishment. Salameh ran BDL for 30 years and faces investigations at home and abroad for embezzlement and money laundering. He was arrested once before, in 2025, and released on USD 14 mn bail over charges he embezzled at least USD 42 mn from the central bank, and is also facing cross-border prosecution, in which French prosecutors separately allege USD hundreds of mns were diverted from the banking system through Forry Associates, an offshore firm controlled by Salameh’s brother. The net has since widened past Salameh to private-banking executives and board members at Bank Audi and BankMed, whom BDL accuses of playing part in several embezzlement schemes that fed the country’s 2019 banking collapse — the crisis that froze depositors out of their savings.
In Iraq, the sweep is broad and fresh. Prime Minister Ali Al Zaidi, in office only since May, has made anti-corruption his signature policy priority. The campaign reaches across ministries, government contracts, and the political elite — the June arrest of at least 47 officials among them.
Both drives are positive signals for commercially-driven foreign capital, but arrests aren’t reform — and far-reaching reform across sectors is what both nations need to de-risk the environment for foreign investors. Lebanon’s test is whether it follows the prosecutions with a real restructuring of its banking sector, the thing investors have been waiting on since 2019. And for Iraq, it’s about whether Al Zaidi can convert that headline-grabbing sweep into regulatory and governance reform and hold the line against the armed factions and outside powers that have stalled prior attempts.
The no-ceasefire bill is coming due: Six months into the US-Iran war and the Hormuz disruption that came with it, the fiscal and macro fallout is getting tighter. Fitch Solutions’ BMI now expects the Saudi economy to contract this year, Iraq’s government is warning it may not make payroll on time, and the Egyptian Cabinet is reaching for electricity tariff hikes it spent the spring promising to avoid. The common thread is a strait that was supposed to start reopening by summer but hasn’t, draining revenue from the region’s oil exporters and forcing net importers to cover an annual fuel bill that is growing everyday Hormuz remains shut.
BMI now expects Saudi economy to contract
Fitch Solutions’ BMInow expectsthe Saudi economy to contract 1.3% in 2026, reversing an earlier 1.1% growth call, after the Strait of Hormuz disruptions lasted longer than its models assumed. The announcement came after the Saudi General Authority for Statistics released 2Q data showing that the Kingdom’s real GDP already contracted 4.8% y-o-y, marking the Kingdom’s first annual contraction since 4Q 2023 and its steepest since the pandemic.
The swing comes down to one variable: Hormuz. BMI had expected shipping through the strait to begin normalizing in July. It now sees disruptions lasting until late 3Q. On that timeline, oil production is forecast to fall 12% this year, with a 25% y-o-y drop in 3Q alone, before a partial recovery in 4Q. The non-oil side took a harder hit in 2Q than expected too, prompting BMI to cut non-oil growth to around 1% from 2%, with exports bearing the brunt.
What holds up: BMI is clear that the contraction is concentrated in oil, not spread across the economy. Consumer spending remains resilient on rising real wages and continued job creation. The non-oil sector, now more than half of GDP, kept expanding through 1H. Saudi Arabia is one of just two Gulf states, alongside Oman, still expected to post non-oil growth this year.
BMI sees 7.6% growth next year, which would be one of the Kingdom’s strongest years in two decades. Saudi GDP has exceeded 7% only twice since 2006, IMF data shows. The projection assumes Hormuz reopens fully, driving a 24.4% rebound in oil output alongside recovering non-oil exports, higher investment, and consumption growth pushing non-oil GDP close to 5%.
Where BMI sits against the field: The IMF is holding its full-year 2026 call at 1.7% growth (2.6% non-oil) and sees a 5.5% rebound in 2027, both contingent on Hormuz normalizing. A Reuters poll last month also trimmed 2026 growth to 1.4%. But with 2Q already 4.8% down, 1H is tracking negative, and those full-year forecasts now rest on a sharp second-half recovery that has not begun.
And Iraq is sounding the payroll alarm
Baghdad is now saying out loud whatwe flagged in Mayas its central vulnerability during the war: It may not be able to pay its people on time. “There is a very large gap now between revenues and spending on monthly requirements, mainly wages to civil servants, services and government offices. This means salaries will not be paid on time,” government spokesperson Haidar Al Aboudi said last week.
It’s all about Hormuz: Iraq’s state oil company Somo put 1H 2026 export earnings at c. USD 18.5 bn on average flows of 1.5 mn bbl / d (thanks to a land corridor to Syria and its Turkey-bound pipeline). That is, however, just about a third of pre-war exports and a fraction of the USD 154 bn in average annual oil revenue Baghdad had recorded across 2023-2025. The war has cost Iraq some USD 45 bn by one government aide’s estimate, and the deficit ran to c. USD 5 bn in the first four months of the year alone.
REMEMBER- We flagged back in May that the first real test for recently-appointed Prime Minister Ali Al Zaidi wasn’t whether he could reform Iraq, it was whether he could make payroll. Two months on, the Finance Ministry is still weighing domestic borrowing to bridge the gap and hoping to steer clear of foreign markets after burning through reserves to sustain government spending.
One update cuts (slightly) against the gloom. Iraq and Turkey signed an agreement over the weekend to move crude through the Kirkuk-Ceyhan pipeline at some 750k bbl / d. The agreement, which comes a few days after Al Zaidi left Ankara without an agreement on the pipeline, is a one-year stopgap, temporarily replacing the over 53-year-old arrangement that lapsed on 27 July as the countries work towards a comprehensive framework meant to lift capacity past the 1 mn bbl / d mark. The pipeline can theoretically carry about 1.5 mn bbl / d, but damage during war, limited maintenance upkeep, and legal disputes meant it was working under-capacity for the last few years.
Egypt goes for electricity rate hikes — and fuel may follow soon
Hedging against prolonged war? That appears to be the main driver behind the Egyptian Cabinet’s recent decision to hike household electricity tariffs, despite pre- and post-war pledges earlier this year to hold off further increases in 2026. The decision will hike tariffs by an average of 12%, and comes as the fuel import bill rises amid continued Hormuz disruptions, with the government now looking to hedge 65% of its fuel imports against further global price shocks
Egypt has gone through several tariff hikes over the last few years, as part of a reform drive that aims to bring subsidies on electricity to zero. The new structure will keep the lowest consumption bracket unchanged, and most residential users’ bills would still be well below full cost recovery, with the government still expected to absorb around EGP 100 bn annually due to the gap between volatile fuel-pegged production costs and retail tariffs. The FY 2026-27 budget set aside EGP 104.2 bn for electricity subsidies, up 39% from the previous fiscal year.
Egypt faces tough choices to manage its energy bill: The government is now weighing two bitter pills — reinstate its capped fuel pricing mechanism or freeze pump prices and force heavy industry to cover the shortfall. The government will decide by late September whether to return to its automatic fuel pricing mechanism, which limits pump hikes to 10%, or maintain its current “cost-recovery” framework, a government official tells EnterpriseAM.
Another hike is unavoidable at current market prices and conditions, former Egyptian Natural Gas Holding Company head Medhat Youssef tells us. One alternative could be replacing some natural gas consumption with more high-sulfur mazut, Youssef told us. The government turned to mazut alongside gas earlier this year to maintain power generation during supply disruptions.
ICYMI- The government raised pump prices by up to 17.1% in March under the exceptional cost-recovery system, exceeding the automatic mechanism’s usual ceiling. It then raised natural gas prices for energy-intensive industries by USD 2 per mmbtu in May and began reviewing a more flexible industrial gas-pricing formula. Prime Minister Moustafa Madbouly said last month that quarterly automatic pricing would return this quarter, but the latest discussions suggest the government could instead hold pump prices and recover more of the gap from industrial users.
MEANWHILE- War tailwinds are narrowing for Egypt’s fertilizer exports. The Investment Ministry has reportedly scrapped the 10% export duty on nitrogen fertilizers over the weekend, following a 39% drop in export prices to around USD 550 per ton from nearly USD 900 in April and a sharp slowdown in shipments over the past two months. The levy was first introduced as a USD 90-per-ton fee in May and was later reduced to just 10% of the shipment’s value later in June in response to the shrinking war margins that drove the initial duty. Egypt’s nitrogen-fertilizer exports rose 39.7% y-o-y to USD 1.4 bn in 1H 2026 following the earlier price surge as Gulf flows of the fertilizer slowed down.
It’s an unusually quiet Monday morning for the deals desk, but one headline more than makes up for it.
HSBC is winding down more than four decades of retail banking in Egypt but has no intention of pulling back from corporate and institutional banking, which account for the lion’s share of its business here. The lender said yesterday that it has reached a definitive agreement with Emirates NBD Egypt that will see it hand over its entire retail business for an undisclosed sum, according to statements from both banks released after banking hours yesterday (here and here, pdf).
It’s the second significant regional move this summer for Emirates NBD after its USD 2.8 bn acquisition in June of a 60% stake in India’s RBL Bank. The group operates in 13 countries with more than 25 mn active customers and some USD 360 bn in total assets. ENBD, led in Egypt byAmr El Shafei, is majority controlled by the Emirate of Dubai through the Investment Corporation of Dubai and Dubai Holdings, which together hold almost 56% of the bank’s shares.
If it goes through, the transaction will make Emirates NBD the sixth or seventh-largest retail franchise in Egypt, by our maths, behind heavyweights NBE, Banque Misr, CIB, Banque du Caire, and QNB Al Ahli.
Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund is back in an Indian IPO for the second time in a month. Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (Adia) has taken a USD 21 mn anchor stake in Manipal Health Enterprises’ INR 92.8 bn (USD 972 mn) listing, India’s largest hospital-chain IPO to date, after doing the same for SBI Funds Management earlier in July. ADIA was allotted 3.4 mn shares at INR 590 (USD 6.2) apiece — the top of the INR 560-590 (USD 5.9-6.2) band — or 4.8% of the 70.6 mn-share anchor book.
The anchor round — which also drew Morgan Stanley Asia, Goldman Sachs Bank Europe, and existing backer Temasek — raised INR 41.7 bn (USD 440 mn) the day before the public offer. The IPO was four-fifths new capital: A fresh issue of INR 80 bn (USD 839 mn) and an offer for sale of INR 12.7 bn (USD 134 mn) by existing shareholders, including Temasek. It ran 29-31 July and closed 5.12x oversubscribed, led by qualified institutional buyers at 8.5x. Retail investor subscription came in at 0.98x and non-institutional demand was 1.1x.
The managers: Axis Capital, Kotak Mahindra Capital, Goldman Sachs (India) Securities, Jefferies India, JP Morgan India, UBS Securities India, and DBS Bank India ran the book, with KFin Technologies as registrar.
Forget oil and airports — the biggest single corporate bet on Syria’s postwar economy right now is cotton, wheat, and cheese. Qatar's Baladna Food Industries is sinking USD 3.3 bn into a farming and food-processing venture spanning 2.4k sqkm across the Euphrates basin in Raqqa and Deir Ezzor, land long neglected under Assad, The National reports.
The family behind it is a familiar one: Baladna is chaired by Syrian-Qatari tycoon Moutaz Al Khayyat, who, with brother Ramez, already holds energy, power, and transport positions across Syria's rebuild.
GO DEEPER- Al Khayyat isn’t the only Gulf name making outsized bets here. Emaar’s Mohamed Alabbar pledged up to USD 18 bn for Syrian developments in May, a figure that firmed up in July into a USD 20 bn plan for Latakia and Damascus with Syrian-majority ownership. UAE-Syria ties are extending into food supply chains too: The two are launching an agricultural system covering the entire chain, with ADX-listed Mair Group building four processing centers, UAE agritech firm NVSSoft developing the digital platform, and Syrian farmers exporting fresh produce to the UAE via Iraq.
Zoom out and it fits a pattern: Gulf capital has now committed roughly USD 28 bn to Syria's reconstruction, against a World Bank estimate that the real bill runs to USD 216 bn. The tell on Baladna’s project will be whether the international bank financing it's counting on actually shows up.
ALSO WORTH KNOWING TODAY-
A shoutout is in order for our friends at EFG Hermes, whose securities brokerage division ranked first across five MENA markets in 1H 2026, according to a press release (pdf). EFG Hermes secured the top spot in Egypt, Kuwait, and the UAE, topping the EGX, Boursa Kuwait, Dubai Financial Market, Abu Dhabi Exchange, and Nasdaq Dubai, the company said, citing official market share data. The brokerage also ranked number 10 in Saudi Arabia, with its market share rising to 6.5%.
Egypt has boosted its electricity export to Libya by 43% to reach 100 MW, following a nationwide grid collapse in Libya last month, according to a government official cited by the Arabic press. This comes after a meeting between Egyptian Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly and Libya’s Tripoli-based Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dbeibah in New Alamein and Libya reportedly cleared some USD 100 mn in accumulated electricity import arrears dating back to 2023.
ICYMI- Earlier in July, a failed transmission line in western Libya cascaded into a nationwide blackout, knocking out roughly 1.4 GW and cutting power and water to most of the country. Egypt began providing 70 MW of power to Libya after Tripoli paid down the arrears, with a schedule to clear the remaining USD 41 mn of a USD 141 mn tab before end-2026.
Shared login?
Will the GCC get a unified logistics platform? The GCC General Secretariat is reviewing a proposal to create a unified digital platform linking logistics services across the six member states, the Kuwait Chamber of Commerce and Industry told Al Eqtisadiah after it submitted this proposal. The proposal has been referred to ministerial committees for review before any implementation decisions.
What it would do: The platform would connect shipping companies, importers, exporters, warehouse operators, ports, and logistics zones, while providing real-time data on port capacity, transport costs, customs procedures, storage availability, and freezones. It would also include AI-powered route and service matching, allowing users to compare logistics options across sea, land, and air. A pilot phase is planned before any wider rollout.
Why this matters: The Hormuz crisis has highlighted the lack of a coordinated Gulf logistics system, with cargo rerouted through ad hoc bilateral arrangements and emergency measures. A shared platform could make capacity and routing options more transparent across the GCC.
But don’t hold your breath just yet: The proposal must first clear ministerial review, and GCC integration projects have often taken years to move from agreement to implementation. And even if it advances, many of the logistics synergies that could be unlocked through GCC cooperation may require less of a digitized platform for real-time data and more of a cross-border regulation that unifies customs and clearance rules, as well as freight and road safety — which are historically key friction points at the borders.
Test…test…export
Tunisian-born EV startupBako Motorshas exported its first batch of cars to Germany as part of a 20-vehicle order, just a few weeks after becoming the first Tunisian automaker to obtain a European certificate of conformity. The export push comes at a critical juncture in the Tunisian innovator’s push to scale up its production and enter new markets, with plans to export 88 vehicles to Europe in 2026 and 800 in 2027. The company’s production is currently evenly split between domestic and export markets, with plans to scale exports to account for 70% of production, Founder and CEO Boubaker Siala previously told us.
Bako Motors is making a niche bet on compact EVs that integrate solar power and lithium batteries. The company makes compact cars and cargo vans, and has a few global competitors in this niche, such as the Netherlands’ Squad Mobility, India’s Vayve Mobility and US-based Aptera Motors. The startup was founded in 2021, initially designing three-wheelers before pivoting to compact four-wheelers, and has so far sold some 400 vehicles in the domestic market. Beyond Germany, Bako Motors’ export orderbook includes Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Italy, and France.
GO DEEPER- Bako’s export drive is the ‘build local, scale global’ playbook that has come to define Tunisia's tech scene, as we reported in June. “We started in Tunisia for about three years. We validated the product, the production line, and the market. And then we moved to Saudi and Europe,” Bako Motors Siala told us, pointing at a similar arc that also carried expense-management platform Expensya to a USD 120 mn-plus sale to Sweden's Medius and AI firm InstaDeep to a roughly USD 680 mn exit to BioNTech — two of Africa's largest tech exits despite coming out of one of North Africa's smallest economies.
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