Generation Start-up: NymCard is making repayments accessible to the center East's unbanked

When Omar Onsi launched his repayments processor company NymCard, he previously had an abundance of encounter in navigating the tricky world of entrepreneurship. As a serial business owner, he built businesses from scratch, scaled them efficiently and actually experienced disruption on the way.

“I love business, I love selling things, I love building things,” says Mr Onsi, who before NymCard founded two major telecommunication start-ups, including a good Skype-like voice over internet protocol company called Nymgo.

The thought of NymCard came when Mr Onsi was unable to get yourself a payment card issued when he was operating out of Lebanon.

“That got me personally … [and I] decided to take on the challenge and actually work on that big trouble,” he says.

He launched NymCard in 2018. The company focuses on processing transactions and issuing cards, including over the internet cards with respect to banks, financial institutions and FinTechs that could hook up with mobile platforms.

NymCard does not contend with repayment giants such as for example MasterCard and Visa, instead it works together with them, enabling digital and mobile-first applications to method payments.

The company can be building its own technology to process transactions, which Mr Onsi says is a market gap that NymCard plans to address.

“The existing players in this business are all legacy players, specifically, the ones serving the Mena region … they don't really own the technology and they are extremely slow and expensive,” he says.

“We built our technology from surface up, and we're offering it over open APIs [application programming interface]. That is something that even now does not exist.”

Companies like NymCard are disrupting a good $200 billion digital repayments industry in the centre East and North Africa region, which is booming because of an online-only pivot of some of the local lenders as they focus on a tech-savvy millennial customer base, and a growth in e-commerce transactions. The Covid-19 pandemic features further fuelled the boom in digital and contactless repayments, fast tracking the region’s voyage to lessen its reliance on income.

Mr Onsi says there exists a huge probable to disrupt the cards payments sector in the Middle East if the rules keep speed with the velocity of changes.

“The extra regulation moves around at our speed, the extra we can serve the marketplace … the demand is large out there,” he says, particularly in countries with large unbanked populations in the Mena region.

This past year, it teamed up with Iraq-based International Network for Cards, Digital Payment Service and Visa to roll out an electronic prepaid payment card called Neo. The users can major up the cards through INC’s offline network of brokers but the entire 'know your customer' procedure for the card is done online and powered by NymCard.

“Iraq is the second most significant under banked market found in the Mena place. It is nonetheless a cash-based economy, but simultaneously, everyone is on a smartphone [since they are] linked to the internet,” says Mr Onsi.

“People were always buying a approach to pay online, and Visa and MasterCard, could make that happen, however the infrastructure is still not there. We helped our clientele to issue the first Visa virtual cards in Iraq.”

In Jordan - another promising Middle East industry for digital payments - NymCard collaborated with Invest Bank to roll away a mobile payments iphone app called Yap this year. The company enabled app users to hyperlink their Invest Bank debit or credit cards to Yap’s digital wallet and generate contactless payments.

In the years ahead, NymCard plans to extend into more “offline” market segments but it isn't losing sight of market segments like the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. “There are lots of opportunities out there, nevertheless, you want to know how to navigate during that and customise your provider, to make certain you're assembly what your customers are trying to find,” he says.

The company is continuing to grow because it started operations, but the pace of expansion has accelerated drastically after Mr Onsi decided to relocate the firm to Abu Dhabi’s tech accelerator Hub71 in 2019.

NymCard has received an in-principle authorization from Abu Dhabi Global Market’s Financial Solutions Regulatory Authority, which allows it to hold money, transfer funds, perform currency exchange transactions and complement its recent scope of actions. The ADGM's FSRA acceptance will also enable the business to work more carefully with global players such as Visa, MasterCard and Western Union.

To further fuel its expansion, Mr Onsi and his crew have raised $12 million in seed funding from investors. Most funds have already been invested into exploration and development, which is a core place of target for the company.

“We're handling people's money here and it's a highly regulated organization. You cannot create a simple POS [level of sale technology] that breaks in the centre, and you lose client money or get hacked. So almost all of our funding goes into the R&D in building the platform.”

NymCard is found in hiring mode to aid its growth, Mr Onsi says. The start-up currently employs 30 to 35 people, but it expects to deliver another 35 people onboard by the finish of 2021.

In the years ahead, Mr Onsi hopes the technology that NymCard is usually building will help it exchange the “large legacy players”. He didn't disclose the payment quantity NymCard happens to be processing but explained he expects it to develop in the future.

“We would definitely be more mature, larger and [will be] processing significant volumes of repayment transactions. That's where we observe ourselves in the brief to medium term.”

Q&A good with Omar Onsi, founder of NymCard

What skills perhaps you have learned from your own businesses?

I would say interaction. You can't ever really have more than enough of that skill. Almost always there is room to boost it. Entrepreneurs, staff members and associates ... they [all] take stuff for granted; like how the message will probably go across. That is an art that [an entrepreneur] must keep working on and bettering as you go.

What are a number of the things you'll have done differently for those who have a opportunity to start over?

It’s validating the companions you're going to work with. These partners can be employees, board members or investors. Therefore, when you reflect again, you say, ‘Well, I wish I validated that partnership before I signed on it'. It has always been a common one between all of the businesses that I’ve experienced.

What is your suggestions to early stage business owners who are trying to make it big?

You know, as an entrepreneur, creating a company from scratch is under no circumstances easy, no matter what the business enterprise model is. And the only path to make it is to possess that persistence and believe in your organization. And you do not give up, regardless of how hard it gets. But at the same time, be very available to a lot of guidance from people that you think would know more than you. Avoid being also stubborn and declare ‘this is definitely my conviction, I'm not going to transformation it’ -that's incorrect. Be very persistent but [also] incredibly keen to take the feedback and filter through the noise.

Have you got any role models running a business?

A long time ago, I was on a Hilton Hotel plus they had a biography of Conrad Hilton in the drawer following to the bed. I read that, and I think that guy was an incredible entrepreneur. The trip that he experienced, I still reflect on it today and [relate to] the ups and downs that he previously to choose through. He previously lived through the fantastic Depression, but was persistent and designed that massive manufacturer, which is normally Hilton today. That encouraged me at that time and still does.