Going 100% Cashless with Kiwe
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While ordering a cup of coffee in 2018, Fatma Khalifa found herself in an all-too familiar situation; she had left her wallet at home. She quickly called her brother Mohamed to come rescue her from the situation and pay the check. On the awkward ride home, the siblings kept thinking of all the different ways that this embarrassing encounter could’ve been avoided, inevitably realizing that without cash, many transactions in Egypt are simply not possible. They called up their childhood friend Omar Kamel, who admitted to facing the same issues and together the trio set to work.
Omar, Fatma, and Mohamed had recently moved back to Egypt from living in Europe and The United States, where cashless is king. “I was using everything from Venmo to Apple Pay, but I couldn’t find a similar solution here in Egypt. All business lines and services still use some form of cash which doesn’t help with social payments,” Fatma recalled. The founders knew how important these apps were in their day-to-day interactions and the impact they had on their finances. With Venmo’s unprecedented success in peer-to-peer transactions, the founders had a great use-case to benchmark.
