In Africa’s fast-growing fintech sector, where small startups often outpace legacy giants, Dubai-based Enza is emerging as a key player. The young fintech, founded in 2022 by former Network International executives, just secured $6 million in seed funding to fuel its expansion across the continent.
At the heart of Enza’s mission is a bold plan: build robust infrastructure for banks and fintechs while solving long-standing payment challenges across Africa’s fragmented financial landscape. The company’s platform bridges the gap between issuing and acceptance, enabling banks to serve businesses of all sizes with local payment solutions from cards and wallets to real-time payments.
Enza’s founders, Hany Fekry and Hamish Houston, are no strangers to Africa’s payments industry. Both spent years in leadership roles at Network International, a dominant processor in the Middle East and Africa. Yet, during their time there, they saw a critical gap in how banks and fintechs could access the technology needed to compete in Africa’s evolving markets.
“Rather than fight internally, we stepped back and rethought the problem,” Enza’s CEO, Fekry, shared.
That decision led to Enza’s official launch in January 2023 with a vision to give banks and fintechs the tools to reclaim lost ground from rising competitors.
Unlike Network International, which focused heavily on card acceptance and merchant acquiring, Enza takes a full-stack approach. Its platform serves both banks on the issuing side and small businesses and merchants on the acceptance side offering flexibility and transparency many players currently lack.
Enabling Banks and Fintechs to Compete and Win Back Market Share
Across Africa, payment acceptance often marks the first step toward financial inclusion for millions of small, underserved businesses. Enza’s infrastructure helps banks and fintechs capture this critical entry point — offering low-cost in-person and online payments to merchants.
But payments are just the beginning. Once embedded in these ecosystems, Enza plans to help its partners cross-sell additional financial services — from loans and savings to insurance — turning simple transactions into valuable long-term relationships.
“Payments open the door,” explained Andrew Key, Enza’s executive director. “But the real opportunity lies in the data and the broader services we can layer on top.”
That approach comes as traditional banks rethink their strategies. For years, many ceded ground to agile fintechs like Flutterwave, Paymob, and Moniepoint — Nigeria’s largest merchant acquirer. Now, banks are looking to reclaim their role by partnering with platforms like Enza that offer regulatory support, visibility, and control.
“Banks realized they gave away too much,” Houston added. “We’re helping them get it back with better tech.”
Enza’s platform is already live across six African markets including Nigeria, Egypt, Ghana, Rwanda, Uganda, and South Africa. The company processes over 10 million monthly transactions through partnerships with local banks.
One of Enza’s core strengths is its ability to connect banks to a wide range of payment rails. It integrates with local card schemes like Verve, AfriGo, and Meeza, while also supporting Visa and Mastercard. On the real-time payments side, Enza taps into national systems like Nigeria’s NIBSS, South Africa’s PayShap, and Egypt’s InstaPay.
Beyond that, Enza enables mobile money, telco wallets, QR codes, buy-now-pay-later (BNPL), and contactless payments giving banks the flexibility to serve diverse customers with evolving needs.
Transparency is another key feature. Many African banks still struggle to track the performance of their payment partners or downstream merchants. Enza’s system brings visibility and compliance tools helping banks stay ahead of regulations while scaling their services.
Enza Leveraging Experience and Strategic Relationships
Enza’s founders are tapping into their decades of experience and extensive relationships with nearly 200 banks across Africa. Yet, this time, they’re chasing quality over quantity.
“We’re focused on building 30 to 40 high-quality bank partnerships, not hundreds,” Houston explained.
Despite only operating for a year, Enza’s volumes are growing 35-40% month-over-month — a sign of strong demand for its offerings. The startup runs a per-transaction revenue model, charging banks each time their systems process payments.
Initially self-funded, Enza recently closed its $6 million seed round, led by Algebra Ventures and Quona Capital. The founders say they didn’t need to shop the deal widely their track record did the heavy lifting.
“We backed Enza because of the team’s unmatched experience in launching, scaling, and exiting fintechs in Africa,” said Tarek Assaad, Managing Partner at Algebra Ventures.
The fresh capital will fuel team expansion and accelerate new product rollouts allowing Enza to double down on empowering Africa’s financial institutions.
“At the core, we founded Enza to solve real infrastructure problems across Africa,” Fekry shared. “Our goal is simple make financial services accessible, affordable, and always on, just like people expect in Europe or the U.S.”
