NymCard Gets $33 Million to Deepen MENA Embedded Finance Presence

Embedded finance platform NymCard has raised $33 million to extend its MENA region presence.

The company’s Series B round, announced Wednesday (March 19), was led by QED Investors, and marks that group’s biggest investment in the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region.

NymCard says the funding will help it deepen its presence in more than 10 MENA markets, boosting its payment infrastructure solutions to better serve clients such as banks, FinTechs and other enterprises with card issuing, embedded lending and money movement.

“NymCard is a true testament to the ripe and flourishing ecosystem we are seeing across MENA,” Gbenga Ajayi, partner and head of Middle East and Africa at QED Investors, said in a news release.

“By providing out-of-the-box card issuing and embedded finance solutions, NymCard is bridging the fintech gap and empowering businesses with the infrastructure they need to innovate. With its API-first approach, NymCard is expanding financial access for startups and enterprises, driving SME growth, and strengthening MENA’s digital economy.”

According to the release, NymCard has worked with more than 50 banks, FinTechs and enterprises on personal finance offerings throughout the region. That has meant things like helping to support Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 plan for a cashless economy and promoting digitized money movement in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

The company’s new funding comes at a moment when, as PYMNTS wrote last week, embedded finance is transforming “what it means for banks, businesses and FinTechs to interact, in real time, with customers, generating new revenue and giving end users a broad range of payments options that fit their needs.”

As that report notes, embedded finance takes banking, payments and lending into the non-financial realm, where apps and online interactions can include things like buy now, pay later (BNPL) and other options at the point of sale.

“The smartphone and the tablet become gateways — along with the firms’ own apps and platforms — to commerce ecosystems that keep consumers engaged and transacting, while improving the cash flows of the firms (and by extension, banks and FinTechs) with which they do business,” PYMNTS wrote.

And as covered here more recently, embedded finance is also reshaping the world of B2B procurement, part of a larger digital-first evolution of that world.

“There has definitely been an uptick in B2B-type platforms that are looking to add additional services to their product offering,” Justin Downey, vice president of product at Maverick, told PYMNTS. “There’s been a lot of development with third parties and ease of integration through APIs. Adding this payment piece to an existing offering just makes sense.”