An entity managed by Switzerland’s responsAbility Investments recently purchased a stake of undisclosed size and price in Fawry, a mobile payments platform in Egypt. Fawry has 20 million customers, whom it enables to pay bills and make retail purchases via mobile phones, credit cards, automatic teller machines, accounts at 23 banks, and point-of-sale machines at 65,000 agents. Fawry hosts 1.5 million transactions per day and also provides business services such as collections.
Fawry CEO Ashraf Sabry said the platform “will enable us to provide financial services for sections of the population that have so far been underserved – at costs that will allow the model to be commercially sustainable.”
Other investors in Fawry include Helios Investment Partners, a UK-based investor in Africa; EFG Hermes’ MENA LTV Fund; Lorax Capital Partners’ Egyptian American Enterprise Fund; and the World Bank Group’s International Finance Corporation.
Founded in 2003, responsAbility is a Zurich-based investment company whose products aim to enable investors to earn a financial return while assisting people in emerging markets to access information and services in sectors such as microfinance, small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) financing, fair trade and independent media. The firm is 30-percent employee held, with the remaining shares owned by Swiss financial institutions Baumann & Cie, Raiffeisen Schweiz, Swiss Re and Bank Vontobel AG. As of 2017, responsAbility reports USD 3.3 billion in assets under management, deployed in 97 countries.
Sources and Additional Resources
ResponsAbility: Private Equity Investment in Leading Mobile Payments Platform
https://www.responsability.com/en/private-equity-investment-leading-mobile-payments-platform
Fawry:
http://fawry.com/
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