Marhaba, fintech friends ☮️

Reporting from Dubai - safe, with a lot of sound.

It is quite the week in this corner of the world. The city’s typical soundtrack - cars, crowds, construction - took a dark turn on Saturday morning. Suddenly, all we could hear was the sound of something unfamiliar, unlikely, unbelievable to the city’s 4 million residents and then… silence.

And the same went for our neighbors in Qatar, Kuwait, Saudi, Bahrain and Oman.

Since then, we’ve been watching the UAE’s air defense system do its thing, but there have been some more tangible first order impacts. An AWS data center was struck by an unidentified object, leading to a service outage for many financial companies from Sunday through to Monday-Tuesday.

Kuwait’s Capital Markets Authority suspended trading on its stock exchange for 2 days, while the UAE closed Dubai and Abu Dhabi’s for 3 days and reopened today. The Dubai Financial Market General Index closed down 4.7%, marking its steepest single-day drop since mid 2022. Abu Dhabi equities ended the day down 2%, after falling as much as 3.6%.

It is unclear where this is going and how long this will last. There is a lot of debate about what this means for regional markets, ranging from flight risk to business-as-usual.

It’s a wait-and-see game for now. I’ll share the updates here weekly.

Until then, here’s what happened this week in fintech.

💸 Fundraises and Exits

🇲🇦 Morocco’s WafR closes a $4 million oversubscribed seed round, co-led by pan-African VC fund, LoftyInc Capital, Attijariwafa Ventures and Almada Ventures

🇦🇪 Takeem, a UAE-based proptech, receives an investment from REACH, an accelerator created by Second Century Ventures, the investment arm of the US National Association of Realtors

🇧🇭 Foras AI increases its stake in Bahrain’s Beban as the crowdfunding platform enters the Egyptian market.

💰 Funds

🇦🇪🇨🇭 Switzerland’s CV VC merges with Abu Dhabi-based accelerator, Elixir.

🇦🇪 Shorooq’s Presight Fund I invests in 5 AI start-ups, including NodeShift, Candid, Hebbia, Blue and Crunched.

🚀 Partnerships & Product Launches

🇸🇦 Mastercard and Google grow their partnership to expand the use of Google Pay across the Kingdom

🇦🇪 Dubai Chambers partners with Mamo, Qashio, Pemo and Vault to expand access to alternative and digital banking services for SMEs

🇦🇪 Antier launches a VARA-compliant white label cryptocurrency exchange platform for financial institutions entering regulated digital-asset markets in MENA

🇰🇼 Jazeera Airways introduces Fly Now, Pay Later payments

🇪🇬🇮🇶 MoneyHash launches in the Iraqi market, partnering with local payment solutions provider, Wayl

🇦🇪 The Central Bank of the UAE partners with Core42 to build a dedicated sovereign cloud service infrastructure for the financial sector

🇦🇪 UAE-based proptech, Rewa, launches its digital payment and rewards app across the Emirates.

🏛 Licensing & Regulations

🇹🇳 Tunisia’s Central Bank licenses Ooredoo Fintech to launch walletii in the country

🇦🇪 Dubai’s VARA grants ShipFinex, a UAE-based digital platform for fractional ownership of ships through maritime asset tokenization, in-principle approval for a Broker-Dealer license

🇦🇪 UAE Ministry of Finance issues the official Electronic Invoicing Guidelines to help businesses prepare for the national e-invoicing system rollout

🇴🇲 The Central Bank of Oman introduces new regulation governing BNPL

🇦🇪 The Central Bank of the UAE issues responsible AI guidelines for licensed financial institutions.

Thank you for tuning in!

If you have feedback on this edition of This Week in Fintech MENA, please reach out on LinkedIn.

Until next week,

Salam ✌🏼