Over the past decade, Dubai-based Network International has become one of the dominant payment processors across the Middle East and Africa, thanks in part to a pair of acquisitions.
However, many large incumbents can fall prey to slower innovation, opening the door for smaller, faster-moving startups. The latest development is Enza, a fintech founded in 2022 by Hany Fekry, a former managing director at Network, along with another ex-Network executive Hamish Houston.
The fintech, which has raised $6 million in seed funding, is building infrastructure for banks and fintechs, offering a range of local payment solutions, from cards to wallets to real-time payments.
Before launching Enza, the founders managed global acceptance, processing, and consumer finance departments at Network International. While Network was building a robust payments network across the Middle East and Africa, focusing primarily on the acceptance side of things, they felt a massive gap in creating comprehensive solutions for banks and fintechs, especially in Africa.
When neither party could find an alignment with Network, they resigned to start Enza, which officially launched in January 2023.
“Our divergence prompted us to take a step back and rethink how to address these underserved needs in the market,” CEO Fekry told TechCrunch.
The founders of Enza say they’ve built the company using lessons from their time at Network International and its subsidiary, DPO Group. But unlike those firms, which focused largely on card acceptance and merchant acquiring, Enza is taking a broader approach, serving both sides of the transaction.
Enza’s platform is designed for banks and fintechs on the issuing side, and SMEs and merchants on the acceptance side. The startup is initially targeting Egypt, Nigeria, and South Africa, three of the continent’s largest financial markets.
Payments acceptance into broader fintech scale
Payments are often the first entry point into formal finance for the millions of underserved or unbanked small businesses across Africa. Enza wants to help these businesses accept in-person and online payments at little to no cost — a strategy it thinks will allow banks and fintechs to build long-term relationships.
Once those are in place, Enza’s infrastructure enables cross-selling of lending, savings, insurance, and other financial services.
“Payments are the gateway,” says Andrew Key, who joined Enza as an executive director last year. “But the value is in the data and the services you can layer on top.”
That strategy also plays to the changing dynamics between banks and fintechs in Africa. For years, banks have ceded infrastructure and particularly SME market share to players like Flutterwave, Fawry, Paymob, and Moniepoint, now Nigeria’s largest merchant acquirer. But banks still hold key advantages, namely broader service offerings and regulatory backing.
“Banks have realized they gave up too much ground to fintechs,” Houston said. “We want to give them the tech to compete and win it back.”
Similarly, despite the rise of fintechs across Africa, banks remain the central, regulated players behind most payment aggregators. But many still lack clear visibility into what their aggregator partners or downstream merchants are doing.
That’s one of Enza’s functionalities, the founders say: Giving banks more transparency and control over their payment ecosystems so they can stay compliant while scaling.
The Dubai-based startup also broadens the payment options available to banks. Enza integrates with local card schemes like Verve, AfriGo, and Meeza, alongside global networks like Visa and Mastercard.
It also connects with real-time payment infrastructure, including Nigeria’s NIBSS, South Africa’s PayShap, and Egypt’s InstaPay, as well as mobile money and telco wallets, while supporting QR codes, buy-now-pay-later (BNPL), and contactless payments features.
Leveraging founders’ networks
Enza is leveraging its founders’ decades of experience and deep relationships across the continent to quickly secure contracts with several banks. For instance, Fekry previously served as chief commercial officer at Emerging Markets Payments (EMP), which was acquired by Network International, where he later became a managing director.
Across their careers, the team has worked with nearly 200 banks. But this time, they’re going for quality over quantity. “We’re not trying to replicate that scale,” Houston said. “We’re targeting 30 to 40 high-quality bank relationships.”
While the company only began operations last year, the Dubai-based fintech has already secured over 10 million monthly contracted transactions through live bank partnerships across six African markets, Rwanda, Nigeria, Ghana, Egypt, Uganda, and South Africa.
Enza charges banks on a per-transaction (“per-click”) basis. Those volumes are growing 35 to 40% month-over-month and are expected to double in the next two years.
The company bootstrapped in its early years, with the founders funding it themselves. When they decided to raise outside capital, the founders said they didn’t shop the deal widely.
Instead, Algebra Ventures and Quona Capital led the $6 million seed round. “The Enza leadership team has an impressive track record of starting, growing, and exiting fintech businesses across the continent,” said Tarek Assaad, managing partner at Algebra Ventures, on why his firm backed the two-year-old fintech.
The new capital will go toward expanding the team and rolling out new products for its banking clientele across Africa.
“We founded Enza to solve real infrastructure problems across Africa,” Fekry said. “We’ve spent our careers trying to make sure our families and communities can access financial products as people in Europe or the U.S. at a low cost and anytime they want.”