From MNT-Halan to Zeepay, digital pioneers are building a high-value corridor to the Middle East.
As African fintech matures, companies that once focused on domestic markets are now increasingly seeing Dubai as a strategic base for MENA and international expansion.
Some key players are already on the move. Egypt’s fintech giant MNT-Halan recently launched in Dubai with salary-financing products, while Paymob Technologies has expanded across the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Oman — securing a full UAE Central Bank license last year. Nigeria’s Innovate1Pay runs global operations from Dubai’s Jumeirah since 2019. Lagos-based Flutterwave, one of Africa’s first and fastest-growing fintech unicorns, will soon be the latest to set up shop in the UAE after expanding into Saudi Arabia and Bahrain in 2024.
A key driver of this expansion is the remittance corridor between the Gulf and Africa. Researchers estimate that between 3 million and 5 million African migrants now live and work across the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), including large Egyptian, Sudanese, Ethiopian, Kenyan and Ugandan communities. According to the World Bank, global remittances to Africa reached $109 billion in 2024. About a third comes from the GCC, but a lot of transfers remain unrecorded in national data sets.
Currently, a lot of the money still moves around in cash, through operators such as Western Union, MoneyGram or Gulf exchange houses, where the cost for sending funds averages between 8% and 9% — among the highest in the world.
This opens a clear opportunity for lower-cost digital alternatives. A recent Visa study found nearly two-thirds of UAE residents now prefer digital apps over physical locations for sending money abroad. Key drivers include ease of use (50%), followed by safety, privacy and speed (46%). Cashless solutions are heavily encouraged by most GCC governments to increase compliance, traceability and transparency.
Some companies like Zeepay, a Ghana-based payment firm that already operates in 25 countries, are gearing up to tap into that market and the recent war in the Middle East is far from deterring their motivation.
“For us, it’s a new chapter. We are eager to make an impact and become the remittance solution in the Gulf,” said Kojo Amofa, Partnerships Manager at Zeepay. “Many migrant workers want to send money home, and the current volatility creates an even more drastic need that we want to answer.”
For Zeepay, the UAE is the natural entry point. It is the MENA region’s most mature tech hub and the world’s third-largest remittance sender — sometimes described as a financial “switchboard” for Africa-bound flows. To make its first steps, the company is looking for partnerships with digital payment firms already located in Dubai or Abu Dhabi, who would be interested in trying out an African remittance corridor.
“We need to test the appetite. Rather than entering a market we are not native to, we prefer collaboration so that our services can be tried out,” said Amofa. “Once there is a significant level of interest, we can then start to explore creating a physical presence.”
While exploring options in the GCC, the teams at Zeepay, like many African startups, are also keeping an eye open for funding opportunities.
In 2025, African Fintechs raised $1.5 billion across 150 deals, according to data from global investment platform Partech Partners. A growing number of deals involve GCC investors as sovereign wealth funds and family offices from the UAE and Saudi Arabia are increasing their exposure to African assets. In the past decade, GCC countries have invested more than $100 billion in the continent.
In 2022, Nigeria’s Moove.io — a mobility fintech that provides car loans and operates a green ride-hailing platform — raised a $30 million private credit sukuk arranged by Franklin Templeton Investments in Dubai. It later opened an office in the UAE to oversee its MENA expansion.
More recently, Kenya’s iconic fintech M-Pesa has teamed up with the UAE-based ADI Foundation to explore blockchain. The partnership gains significant weight from ADI’s parent company, IHC — a $240 billion giant chaired by the UAE president’s brother.
For Gulf investors, the appeal is straightforward: Africa remains the fastest-growing fintech market globally, with revenues projected to rise thirteenfold to $65 billion by 2030, according to Boston Consulting Group. For now, digital payment tools still dominate, but the next phase is expected to center on small- and medium-sized enterprise (SME) finance, credit, and broader digital banking services.
In the medium-long term, a Gulf–Africa fintech corridor is taking shape, with companies scaling up and capital circulating between the two regions. In the short term, there are some regulatory bottlenecks and geopolitical challenges ahead. The war in the Middle East might slow down Gulf investments for a while as governments prioritize spending money at home.
A jury on Monday rejected Elon Musk’s claims against Sam Altman and OpenAI (OPENAI) following less than two hours of deliberations, ending a high-profile legal battle between the tech billionaires, according to media reports.
The nine-person jury unanimously found that
As Chinese-made products are flooding the EU market and threatening thousands of jobs, the European Commission is stepping up its work to protect the bloc’s production from the risks of China’s excess production.
The move comes as data from Chinese customs showed that, in the first four months of 2026, Beijing accumulated a surplus of $113 billion with the EU-27, up from $91 billion over the same period in 2025. The surplus widened by $22 billion over 12 month, while the EU’s trade deficit with China had already reached €359.9 billion in 2025.
Pressure is also mounting on Brussels as Beijing has repeatedly threatened retaliation in recent weeks over several EU laws limiting access to the single market for Chinese companies.
On Friday, China also banned these companies from engaging with the Commission over EU foreign subsidy investigations.
To address the China issue and try to restore a level playing field, EU Commissioners are set to debate the matter on 29 May. What options does Europe have on the table?
1. Cutting dependence on Chinese components
The Financial Times reported on Monday that a plan to force EU companies to buy critical components from at least three different suppliers was in the pipeline at the European Commission.
The idea would be to set thresholds of around 30% to 40% for what can be bought from a single supplier, with the rest having to be sourced from at least three different suppliers, not all from the same country.
The proposal comes after China last year restricted exports of rare earths and chips, which are critical for key EU industries such as green tech, cars and defence.
2. Targeting strategic sectors with tariffs
In its economic security strategy presented last December, the European Commission also said it would present new tools by September 2026 to strengthen the protection of EU industry from unfair trade policies and overcapacities.
“We will fight tooth and nail for every European job, for every European company, for every open sector, if we see they are treated unfairly,” Maroš Šefčovič told Euronews.
A decision to impose new quotas and double tariffs on global steel imports, dominated by Chinese overcapacities, was already agreed by EU countries and the European Parliament in April.
Now the chemical industry is in the spotlight. Chinese chemical imports have surged 81% over five years. But the EU chemical sector also relies on exports abroad, including to China, the industry’s fourth export market, which makes any measure targeting China complicated.
“As an export-oriented industry, the European chemical industry generates over 30% of its sales abroad. That creates a risk of retaliation from third countries,” Philipp Sauer, trade expert at Cefic, the lobby group of the European chemical industry, told Euronews.
3. Hitting imports with anti-dumping or anti-subsidy duties
The Commission can also impose duties on Chinese companies when import prices fall below those at which they sell their products on their domestic market. It can also investigate companies for receiving unfair subsidies.
However, investigations can take up to 18 months, and cases are piling up at the Commission’s DG Trade, which has only around 140 officials to handle them.
Sauer said that between one third and half of all ongoing investigations relate to the chemical sector.
4. Using the Anti-Coercion Instrument
The Anti-Coercion Instrument is a last-resort tool — the so-called trade bazooka — which can be used in cases of economic pressure from a third country and would allow the EU to hit China with strong measures such as restricting access to licences or public procurement in the EU.
But its use would require the backing of a qualified majority of member states, which is not guaranteed.
Germany opposed tariffs adopted by the EU in 2024 against Chinese electric vehicles. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, who has visited China four times in three years, also supports closer ties with Beijing, seeking to secure major Chinese investment.
5. Unifying member states
At the same time, Brussels faces the risk that its decoupling strategy might face significant resistance from national governments. EU member states remain divided over how to approach China, which could in turn allow Beijing to play capitals against each other.
Such differences are already emerging in the information and communications technology (ICT) sector, where the EU has proposed a new mechanism requiring the phase-out of so-called high-risk suppliers, such as Huawei and ZTE, in strategic industries, starting with telecommunications.
The proposal, included in the revamp of the EU Cybersecurity Act, is sparking controversy among several European governments, most notably Spain and Germany, which have long worked with Chinese equipment now deeply embedded in their digital infrastructure.
This de-risking strategy has also raised financial concerns, since Chinese suppliers tend to be much cheaper than European alternatives such as Ericsson and Nokia, partly because they are publicly subsidised by Beijing.
European telecom operators have asked the EU for financial compensation to replace their Chinese equipment, following the example of the US “rip and replace” programme, but neither the EU nor national governments seem keen to put the money on the table.
In other words, the EU’s full decoupling from China might have high political and economic costs.
Whether European countries are willing to bear it remains to be seen.
Uzbekistan’s National Investment Fund, known as UzNIF, began trading on the London Stock Exchange on Monday, marking the country’s first international equity offering.
The fund, which is managed by Franklin Templeton, also launched simultaneously on the Tashkent Stock Exchange through a dual listing structure, bringing Uzbek state-linked assets to international equity markets for the first time.
The opening ceremony at the London Stock Exchange brought together executives, investors and Uzbek officials, with speakers presenting the listing as a significant step in the country’s efforts to expand access to international capital markets.
Speaking during the ceremony, Julia Hoggett, Chief Executive Officer of the London Stock Exchange, described the IPO as “the first ever international IPO out of Uzbekistan” and said the transaction could help “more global investment to flow” into the country’s economy.
Hoggett also said the dual listing marked “a new chapter both in London and in Tashkent”, adding that the offering connected international investors with a portfolio of Uzbek companies through a single fund managed by an international asset manager.
Saida Mirziyoyeva, Head of the Administration of the President of Uzbekistan, said Uzbekistan was preparing “new listings” and expanding private sector participation, while also working on plans linked to the proposed Tashkent International Financial Centre.
Speaking from the London Stock Exchange balcony, Mirziyoyeva said the IPO was “not just about raising capital” but also about “building trust in a new generation of Uzbek institutions”.
Jenny Johnson, President and Chief Executive Officer of Franklin Templeton, described the IPO as “a defining and historic milestone” for both Uzbekistan and Franklin Templeton, saying the transaction had generated more than $2.8 billion in investor demand globally.
Johnson said orders exceeded the initial offering by more than four times during the bookbuilding process, which ran from late April to mid-May. She added that the domestic offering in Tashkent had become the country’s “largest local listing to date”, allowing local investors to participate alongside international institutional funds.
Thirty percent of the fund’s shares were offered internationally through global depositary receipts, while part of the allocation was also made available to domestic investors through the Tashkent Stock Exchange.
According to previously released information from the fund and its advisers, international demand reached around $2.9 billion (€2.6bn), with more than 160 institutional investors participating in the offering. Among them were BlackRock, Franklin Templeton and Redwheel.
The IPO raised approximately $603.6 million (€540m), valuing the fund at around $1.95 billion (€1.74bn) at the offer price. The shares were sold by Uzbekistan’s Ministry of Economy and Finance, meaning the proceeds from the transaction will go to the state rather than directly to the fund itself.
The international tranche included more than 23 million global depositary receipts, or GDRs, listed in London under the trading symbols UZNF and UZ20. One GDR represents 64,700 shares in the fund.
Cornerstone investors, including funds and accounts managed by BlackRock, Franklin Resources and Redwheel, as well as treasury companies linked to the Allan & Gill Gray Foundation, committed a combined $300 million (€268m) to the offering.
UzNIF was established in 2024 under a presidential decree and is managed by Franklin Templeton, the US-based investment company that oversees more than $1.4 trillion (€1.25 trn) in assets globally and operates in more than 150 countries.
The fund’s portfolio includes stakes in 13 state-linked companies operating in sectors considered strategic for the Uzbek economy, including electricity distribution, thermal power generation, hydropower, telecommunications, aviation, rail infrastructure, utilities and banking.
Among the companies included in the portfolio are Uzbektelecom, Uzbekistan Airways, Uzbekhydroenergo and several state energy and infrastructure operators.
The listing also reflects broader efforts to develop domestic capital markets in Uzbekistan and increase participation from local investors alongside international institutions.
Starbucks Corporation (SBUX) announced the early results of its cash tender offers for multiple senior notes, amending the terms to increase its total purchasing capacity to $1.3B.
To accommodate the high volume of participation, Starbucks exercised its right to amend and
Maksim Labkouski
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Despite investor fears, private credit is far from a meltdown because not all risks are the same.
The cracks in the private credit market appear to be widening.
Private credit is a significant alternative to syndicated bank loans as a source of corporate capital provided predominantly by private equity (PE) firms. The market is heavily involved in financing data center capacity, which is burgeoning along with the demand for artificial intelligence. Investors fear that the artificial intelligence capital spending boom poses a threat to the software industry and may be creating a market bubble that leaves private credit funds overly exposed.
Yet there are reasons to believe the potential damage to the private credit market remains manageable and contained.
This article appears in the May 2026 issue of Global Finance Magazine. .
To be sure, when auto parts seller First Brands announced its bankruptcy late last year, which was financed by a credit fund sponsored by investment bank Jefferies Group, it raised alarms in some quarters. Underscoring the opacity of private credit, which is largely unregulated, were allegations that First Brands had borrowed against the same receivables more than once. Meanwhile, defaults elsewhere in the credit sector hit a record high in 2025, according to Fitch Ratings, reaching a 9.2% rate, more than double the 3.6% recorded in 2023. Default rates this January continued upward, reaching 9.4% before slightly easing in February to 5.4%.
As the First Brands financing reveals, banks as well as PE firms are involved in private credit, either by financing investment funds sponsored by Ares Capital, Antares, Apollo, Blackstone, Blue Owl, and the like, or via funds of their own. With pension funds, insurance companies, and increasingly, individuals investing in private credit, law firm Quinn Emanuel warned in a March client memo that the trend may pose systemic risk, even though private credit is still a relatively small part of the overall loan market.
“The result is a transmission chain that runs from the technology companies, through private credit originators, to the regulated banks that lend to them, to the insurers and pension funds that invest alongside them, and potentially to the retirement accounts of ordinary Americans,” the memo’s authors warned.
Only a minority of small corporate borrowers are in trouble, and companies with EBITDA of $25 million or less experienced significantly higher default rates—15.8%—than larger companies in 2025. Healthcare and consumer companies have higher default rates. Fitch also notes that realized losses for first-lien lenders have been limited, with most cases resulting in full or high-percentage recoveries.
Notably, private credit default rates historically tend to run higher than those on broadly syndicated loans, a trend some observers attribute to more customized, and sometimes distressed, lending terms. The January uptick was largely driven by “distressed” exchanges and payment-in-kind (PIK) interest, according to Fitch.
Concerns are growing about PE funds exposed to software. Investors worry that AI will disrupt the software industry, leading to defaults within portfolios of private-credit loans to the sector. But most such funds are diversified, and even those that aren’t may not be as vulnerable to disruption by AI as investors fear. That’s because the large language models underpinning AI require application program interfaces to operate, so software may still be needed to facilitate the technology’s use.
“Implementing AI still requires significant effort to get it to work in a particular environment,” Alen Lin, senior director of North America corporates, technology, at Fitch Ratings, told audiences at a recent webinar held by the firm.
Of course, much depends on the type of application involved. As Fitch notes, companies producing software that is either deeply embedded in enterprise technology systems, leverages proprietary data, or operates in more regulated industries like health care and financial services could benefit from the development of AI. By contrast, those producing software for applications that aren’t so embedded, such as digital content creation or certain types of analytics and visualization tools, are more exposed to AI disruption.
Even if the AI bubble bursts, that risk is unlikely to evaporate, Lyle Margolis, senior director in Fitch’s corporates group, where he manages its private credit business, said in an interview with Global Finance. “AI is here to stay and is going to be disruptive to certain segments of the software market,” he says.
Yet the risks may be overstated. Whether measured by leverage, interest coverage, or EBITDA, “the trends in the software sector have actually been somewhat positive,” he noted. Refinancing risk for the sector is relatively benign. And data-center build-out provides one of several “significant tailwinds” for private credit in the software sector, added Dafina Dunmore, Fitch’s senior director of North American non-bank financial institutions.
Another mitigating factor: Redemption risk, which can see large outflows of capital. However, it is limited largely to business development companies (BDCs), a more liquid, retail-oriented variety of private-credit investment vehicle. Blue Owl, for example, recently blocked redemptions at one of its BDCs and liquidated some others. And the $33 billion Cliffwater Corporate Lending Fund, the largest US private-credit interval received redemption requests on 14%.
Although defaults are rising for these portfolios, redemption risk isn’t a problem for most credit funds, because investors are locked in until maturity. In addition, stress is concentrated in direct lending: corporate loans that fund working capital and growth.
To be sure, many such risks may be hidden, given private credit’s opacity. Blue Owl’s exposure to software loans, among the highest in the industry, is roughly twice as extensive as its public filings indicate, according to a recent analysis by the Wall Street Journal. The paper also found other PE firms whose credit funds exhibit software exposure exceeding what’s publicly disclosed include Blackstone, Ares, and Apollo.
Investor worries may exacerbate Blue Owl’s redemption woes since its data center financing deals involve accounting practices that obscure the risk involved. The main source of concern is likely Blue Owl’s $27.3 billion financing of Meta’s Hyperion data center in Louisiana.
Yet, S&P rates the bond backing the deal, called Beignet, as Meta’s obligation, reflecting that it bears the risk of default. Indeed, investors seem to like that cash-rich Meta stands behind Beignet. The bond was recently spread over a bond financing the CoreWeave data center, which isn’t backed by the hyperscaler.
Still, some wonder if the risks are adequately priced into these issues.
Quinn Emanuel warns that the vagaries of Meta’s accounting treatment may lead to litigation between the parties over who bears the loss if AI fails to meet expectations and Meta chooses not to renew the lease. Blue Owl finances an Oracle data center in similar fashion, but that bond is trading at a discount to Meta’s, partly because Oracle doesn’t back it and partly because the ultimate tenant is less financially stable OpenAI.
“When we rate data centers, to some extent we look at the credit quality of the ultimate tenant,” says Victor Leung, vice president for project finance at ratings firm DBRS Morningstar.
This type of complexity led Quinn Emanuel to warn in its March 13 memo that, “the AI data center buildout—projected to require $5.2 trillion in infrastructure investment by decade’s end—has spawned complex financing structures that are generating significant litigation risk.”
Mark Koziel, CEO of the International Association of International Certified Professional Accountants and president-CEO of the American Institute of CPAs, says he would raise the issue of current accounting rules for such financing arrangements at an upcoming meeting with the Financial Accounting Standards Board. Also last month, the US Department of the Treasury said it would meet with industry and investor representatives to discuss private credit’s potential risk to the financial system.
Thus far, warnings of a private credit meltdown seem overstated.
Credit funds focused on asset-backed finance (ABF), which is based on the value of a borrower’s assets and is the fastest-growing sector in the market, are relatively immune to stress, thanks to their self-liquidating feature. In contrast to direct loans, principal on asset-backed financings is paid back during the life of the loan. As a result, ABF funds don’t face the same refinancing risk as direct lenders.
Sponsors of direct lending funds “don’t have the benefit of those cash flows directed to pay down the loans,” notes Fitch’s Margolies.
Apart from First Brands’ receivables deal with Jefferies, the ABF segment has yet to be fully tested. But a test may soon be underway: Beignet is also asset-backed. Or sort of.
Debt principal remains outstanding at each renewal point, so it isn’t completely self-amortizing. As a result, DBRS Morningstar’s Leung notes, “you face a risk that your facility will lose its source of revenue.” Hence, Meta’s guarantee that it will make up any loss facing investors if it fails to renew the lease and the facility’s residual value falls below a certain threshold.
That scenario is not far-fetched, Quinn Emanuel warns, noting that it’s expensive to convert an AI data center to general-purpose cloud computing or other uses: “If demand for AI computing contracts, these facilities may function as stranded assets with limited alternative use and depressed liquidation value.”
France pushes euro stablecoins and tokenized deposits as EU banks race to close the gap with dollar-led digital payments.
France is pressing European banks to accelerate the development of euro-denominated stablecoins, as policymakers grow concerned that the region might fall further behind the U.S. in the shift toward digital payments and tokenized finance.
Recently, French Finance Minister Roland Lescure publicly called for more euro-based stablecoins and urged banks to explore tokenized deposits, saying the limited circulation of euro-pegged tokens compared with dollar-backed alternatives was “not satisfactory,” during a pre-recorded address to a crypto industry conference.
Meanwhile, a consortium of European banks, called Qivalis, plans to launch a more competitive alternative to dollar-pegged stablecoins in the second half of this year, subject to approval from the Dutch central bank.
Qivalis, which includes banks like ING, UniCredit, and BNP Paribas, was formally unveiled in December and has received continued praise from European authorities. Referring to the initiative, Lescure said, “That is what we need, and that is what we want.” At the same time, he strongly encouraged banks to further explore launching tokenized deposits.
Late in April, the consortium selected Fireblocks as the technology provider for its planned MiCA-compliant euro stablecoin, a step that provides it with the tokenization, wallet, and settlement infrastructure needed to move the project from planning to a planned launch in the second half of 2026.
Around the same time, Societe Generale’s digital assets unit, SG-Forge, said it was expanding its crypto client base to 15 firms, including exchanges, brokers, and wallet providers, showing that bank-linked activity is growing but remains small.
Stablecoins are already widely used in crypto trading and are increasingly being explored for settlement, cross-border payments, and liquidity management, but the market remains overwhelmingly dollar-based as industry participants debate whether euro-pegged coins face demand or regulatory constraints.
Recent research from RBC Capital Markets found that two-thirds of European banks surveyed still view demand for euro-pegged stablecoins as limited. Conversely, Jean-Marc Stenger, CEO of SG-Forge, has argued that a better-regulated infrastructure remains a key condition for broader adoption.
“[There is] a very, very strong need for well-regulated, robust offering in the crypto and stablecoin space,” he said in an interview with Reuters.