NowPay

NowPay is a Cairo-based financial wellness company that provides corporate employees with access to their earned salary ahead of payday, alongside adjacent financial services. The company frames financial wellness around four areas — saving, spending, budgeting and borrowing — and uses payroll advances as its entry product. Employees can also pay bills in advance of their paycheck and contribute money toward co-workers. Repayments are collected automatically as installments deducted from future monthly salaries, removing the need for users to make bank transfers or maintain account balances.

The platform is distributed as an employer-sponsored benefit: NowPay signs agreements with companies, which enrol their staff, and user limits and approvals are tied to HR verification. Advance requests move through processing, transferring and completed states in the app, and can be cancelled by the user until they have been processed. Because a large share of Egyptian users are cash-based, NowPay began issuing debit cards to fund advances more quickly.

Founding story

Co-founder and CEO Mostafa Ashour is a software engineer by training who worked at IBM, co-founded a gaming startup in 2005, and spent about six years at Microsoft as a PM on an incubation team within Microsoft Research, shipping work into Office, Bing, Bing Translate and SharePoint. After later taking on a family manufacturing business, he identified the scope for technology to improve employees' financial wellness and recruited former colleague Ahmed Sabry as co-founder. The initial MVP consisted of a sales deck and early app sketches used to test employer demand before the product was built.

Business model

NowPay contracts with employers, which offer the service to their workforces as an employee benefit. Advances are extended to employees and recovered through automatic installment deductions from subsequent monthly salaries. Advances were initially financed from the company's own equity, with the company subsequently pursuing financial institution partnerships, including an MoU with the Export Development Bank of Egypt, to fund advances at scale.

Salary advances repaid through automatic installment deductions from employees' future monthly salaries, delivered under corporate agreements with employers.

Traction

The company serves clients across sectors, from listed corporates and large local groups to technology startups and multinationals, and has raised several million dollars of venture capital.

Latest developments

Verod-Kepple Africa Ventures lists NowPay among its portfolio companies at the Series A stage, describing the company as focused on scaling its reach within the region.