23 aggregator that currently reaches 20 million Egyptians and processes 1.6 million transactions per day, at 75,000 service points. Fawry enables payments online, using ATMs, through mobile wallets, or at retail agents. Masary, launched in 2009, is a payment processor and aggregator with 45,000 service points and more than 500,000 subscribers. PayMob, launched by recent graduates of American University in Cairo, offers businesses payment acceptance online, via mobile wallet, and in-store. It connects merchants to modern-day payment solutions so that they can improve enterprise-wide efficiency and expand into e-commerce, potentially increasing their market significantly. Another newcomer is MoneyFellows, a digital ROSCA (rotating savings and credit association). In a country where savings clubs—or “Gam-eya”—are standard practice and a large segment of the population is active on social media, a digital ROSCA is a behaviorally informed way to nudge a population that relies on informal financial services toward more formal ones. MoneyFellows allows clients to form a digital ROSCA with their own circle of friends, just as they would in the real world, or to join a public circle. Clients without a track record start at lower circle amounts but can eventually work up to much larger circles. MoneyFellows intends to use the data of circle members’ monthly contributions to develop digitally enabled individual credit products. All these new Egyptian fintechs are in addition to the many e-wallet services that have also launched, including Phone Cash (Fawry and National Bank of Egypt), Orange Money (with BNP Paribas), Vodafone Cash (with Housing and Development Bank), and Flous (Etisalat and National Bank of Egypt). PayFort, an Amazon-owned company, has been active since 2014 supporting merchant acceptance to improve e-commerce across Egypt, partnering with Fawry, the Egypt Post, and all the major banks in Egypt to facilitate payment collection at any of those partners’ agents or branches. The pace and scale of innovation in the payments space is exciting. The question is whether these solutions are expanding access to previously unserved segments or whether they are improving convenience for a market already served. To date, there are an estimated 6 million mobile money accounts in Egypt, however many are dormant. So there is still a lot of room for growth even within the 22 million-person segment of “digitally active” 18- to 27-year-olds. The bigger issue is: How to move beyond payments processing to meaningful financial inclusion—to a holistic approach that includes affordable credit, savings opportunities and budgeting tools? We believe that there are at least four criteria that a solution must meet in order to reach low-income people: Ì Ì Value for the customer: Although the many payment solutions on the market are steadily expanding their offerings,itisnotyetcleariftheyaremeetingtheneeds of low-income people. FSPs first need to have a deep understanding of the needs of the low-income market and then provide solutions that directly address those needs. Many of the existing solutions seem geared to support e-commerce or B2B services. But what do low-income consumers need and want to use? Will the solutions enable informal or unregistered businesses to participate in the digital economy, thus offering a path for low-income customers out of the cash-only economy? Or will the solutions require additional paperwork and hoops to jump through, effectively barring those in the informal sector? Do users need a bank account or credit card to be able to use the solutions? If so, then most of Egypt’s low-income are de facto excluded. Payments solutions also tempt FSPs and other stakeholders to let the good be the enemy of the excellent. That is, they provide a relatively easy way to “check the box” on a financial inclusion agenda without moving on to develop other vital financial opportunities like cash flow management, savings opportunities and insurance. Ì Ì Accessibility and affordability: Service points are expanding rapidly in Egypt, and many are going well beyond Cairo. Accessibility for low-income people also means low-cost and usable without sophisticated technological know-how. However, the ubiquity of mobile money points in markets in sub-Saharan Africa like Kenya is not yet found in Egypt, although the market is growing, and is estimated around 100,000 agents. Ì Ì Ease of Registration: Although several regulatory enablers are needed for digital financial services to