In the payment landscape of the Middle East and Africa (MEA), MoneyHash has successfully raised $4.5 million in funding for its payment orchestration platform tailored for merchants in the region. MEA faces challenges like payment fraud, low checkout conversions, and high transaction failure rates due to its fragmented payment ecosystem and evolving regulations.
Despite the accelerated adoption of digital payments during the COVID-19 pandemic, inadequate infrastructure development remains a hurdle. MoneyHash aims to address this by leveraging its seed investment to enhance technology and fuel regional growth, building on its $3.5 million pre-seed funding secured two years ago.
Nader Abdelrazik, MoneyHash’s CEO, emphasizes the uniqueness of their position, with 10% of all MEA payments being digital. While foreseeing a growth phase, he acknowledges the challenges ahead, emphasizing the need for patience and continuous learning in navigating the burgeoning payments market.
MoneyHash’s payment orchestration platform streamlines processes through unified payment APIs, offering a customizable checkout experience, transaction routing with fraud and failure rate optimization, and a centralized reporting hub. Similar fintech players in this space include Revio, Stitch, Credrails, and Recital.
In an exclusive email interview with TechCrunch, Abdelrazik sheds light on MoneyHash’s collaboration with merchants over the past four years. He highlights the significant variation in payment failure rates across the region, challenging the reliance on averages. Abdelrazik notes that customers often underestimate the complexity of payments, unaware that most payment leakages are fixable.
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MoneyHash’s approach to support merchant growth
Merchants are expanding at a pace surpassing their partner payment service providers (PSPs). These PSPs, working within strict regulations, experience delayed rollouts of new products and customizations compared to the rapid growth trajectory of merchants. In response, MoneyHash has strengthened its collaboration with PSPs, particularly those serving enterprises and prioritizing customer requirements.
“Businesses appreciate the large network of integration we have not just for coverage but for expertise. When they know that we executed all these integrations in-house, they appreciate the team’s expertise and depth of knowledge and leverage our team to navigate difficult questions in payments. They know that working with us makes them future-proof,” noted Abdelrazik, who founded MoneyHash with Mustafa Eid.
“That means team expertise is key for us. Most of the time, we hire exclusively with payments and/or tech backgrounds, even in non-technical positions. We saw massive effectiveness in building a team where customers trust their knowledge and expertise in something specialized and critical like payments.”
Following a Beta launch in 2022, which garnered the participation of key regional players like Foodics, Rain, and Tamatem, the business introduced its enterprise suite last October, targeting large enterprises. Over the past year, the fintech, which integrates with various payment gateways and processors, including Checkout, Stripe, Ayden, Amazon Pay, Tap, and ValU, claimed to have expanded its network of integrations, tripled its revenue and increased its processing volume by 3,000%.
At present, the business boasts 50 active paying customers. It does not offer free tiers; most customers accessing its sandbox without payment are potential clients in the assessment stage, numbering over 100. The payment platform levies a combination of SaaS and transaction fees, commencing at $500 + 0.4%. SaaS fees increase while transaction fees decrease significantly for large enterprises due to volume, Abdelrazik explained.
MoneyHash’s seed round was co-led by COTU Ventures and Sukna Ventures, with participation from RZM Investment, Dubai Future District Fund, VentureFriends, Tom Preston-Werner, GitHub’s founder and early Stripe investor, and a group of strategic investors and operators.
Speaking on the investment, Amir Farha, general partner at COTU, said his firm believes that the full potential of digital payments in MEA is yet to be realized and MoneyHash’s platform can catalyze the growth of digital payments across the region, enabling both global and local merchants to tap into new revenue streams.
In his words, “We are thrilled to renew our support to a team that has consistently demonstrated superior execution, not just in securing top mid-market and enterprise customers, but also in expanding value across the entire chain, even under challenging market conditions.”
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