Cairo FinTech start-up Sympl raises $6m in expansion push

Sympl, a Cairo FinTech start-up, has raised $6 million following the soft launch of its platform last month.

The funding round was led by Dubai-based early-stage venture capital fund Beco Capital, along with participation from Global Ventures, an international VC firm in Dubai, and Cairo-headquartered VC firm A15.

The funds will be used to improve the product offerings and grow the company’s merchant network to “serve multiple product and service categories across online and in-store merchants”, Sympl said in a statement on Thursday.

“It’s a moment of pride for all of Sympl’s team to see the market traction on the platform and to be supported by the strongest VCs in the region in our early launch stage,” said Mohamed El Feky, co-founder and chief executive of Sympl.

Egypt’s first “save your money pay later” service, Sympl is a deferred payment platform that allows merchants to sell products and services directly to bank card holders on short-term, interest-free repayment plans.

The global payments industry, which posted its first contraction in 11 years in 2020 amid the Covid-19 pandemic, is set to return to its long-term growth trajectory, according to management consultancy McKinsey & Company's annual sector report.

The sector's revenue fell 5 per on the year to $1.9 trillion in 2020, but those losses will be recouped this year, bringing revenue back into the range of 2019's record high.

Sympl, which is now accepted at more than 240 retail and online stores in Egypt, serves product and service categories such as electronics, fashion, appliances, furniture, travel, health care, jewellery and education. It aims to reach 1,000 stores by middle of next year.

“The huge market opportunity is evidenced by this capital raise … [and it recognised] Sympl’s ability to scale and disrupt Egypt’s deferred payments industry and the size of the market opportunity,” Mr El-Feky said.

“We identified the massive potential for pay later options in Egypt and built an intuitive and enjoyable product to help customers shop with access to easy, flexible and interest-free payment plans … users can conclude a transaction in less than 10 seconds.”

Sympl requires no pre-registration and payment plans are approved at the final checkout. Since October, it has established partnerships with some of the leading merchants in Egypt, such as Apple reseller Tradeline, authorised Sony PlayStation reseller Xprs and fashion brands including Tfk, 2S and Blush Boutique.

Separately, Mambu, another start-up, a Netherlands-based provider of banking software, said it raised €235m ($265.9m) in a new funding round led by London-based EQT Growth. It raised the company’s valuation to €4.9 billion, making it one of the highest-valued business-to-business software-as-a-service companies in Europe.

Founded in 2011, Mambu has 10 offices across cities including Abu Dhabi, Dresden, Amsterdam, London and Singapore.

“We want to be able to empower our customers to create any financial product anywhere in the world and create amazing customer experiences,” said Eugene Danilkis, co-founder and chief executive of Mambu.

“This latest round of funding will allow us to accelerate our plans in expanding our mission-critical banking platform to further enable composable business models which are agile and continuously evolving.”

The company’s SaaS banking platform aims to simplify the way financial products are built and deployed by financial institutions. Besides creating new FinTech products, it helps in the migration of existing financial institutions on to modern tech stacks.

It counts banks, lenders, FinTechs and financial institutions as its customers, with more than 50 million end users leveraging Mambu’s technology every day.

The banking and securities enterprise software market is more than €100bn ($113bn) in size and experiencing a double-digit annual growth, according to Gartner.

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