Instant payments reach 16 million users as financial inclusion hits 77.6%

Egypt's instant payment network has reached roughly 16 million users, and the country's financial inclusion rate stood at 77.6% as of December 2025, according to central bank figures.

Registration is not usage

User counts and inclusion rates measure access to an account, not the frequency with which it is used. A population can be nominally banked and still transact predominantly in cash. The more revealing indicators are transaction volumes per user and merchant acceptance.

Where the growth comes from

Mobile wallets extended financial services to people who never held a conventional bank account, using a phone line as the entry point. That makes wallet growth partly a function of mobile penetration, tracked in our review of Egypt's subscriber indicators.

What it enables

Instant, low-cost transfers are a precondition for online government fees, e-commerce outside the major cities, and the fintech business models described in our startup funding report.

The risk side

Real-time settlement removes the window in which fraud was traditionally caught, raising the operational security burden discussed in our cybersecurity analysis.