Mounir Nakhla plans to list only MNT-Halan's Egyptian arm and keep the rest private

MNT-Halan intends to float only its Egyptian business on the Cairo exchange, keeping its operations in Turkey, Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates in private hands.

That structure explains a gap in the numbers that has puzzled observers since the plan emerged. The Egyptian arm is valued at between $900 million and $1 billion for the purposes of the listing, while the group as a whole was valued at $1.4 billion in June. The float is a partial listing rather than a down round.

Mounir Nakhla's company is working with Citigroup and EFG Hermes and has held preliminary meetings with investors, according to Bloomberg. No final decision has been taken and a transaction could come as early as this year.

MNT-Halan became Egypt's first fintech unicorn in 2023, when the Abu Dhabi investment firm Chimera acquired a stake above 20% for $200 million in a $400 million round. It raised a further $157.7 million in July 2024 to fund international expansion.

The June round marked a shift in how Egyptian banking regards it. Al Ahly Capital, the investment arm of the National Bank of Egypt, took the first equity position any commercial bank has held in the company, at a $1.4 billion valuation. MNT-Halan has worked with more than thirty Egyptian banks and finance houses as a counterparty; this was the first to become a shareholder.

Nakhla founded the business in 2018 after a career at Citibank and EFG Hermes. It runs a single application, Halan, supported by physical outlets across Egypt, offering consumer and business lending, payments, e-wallets, savings, investments and financing for online sellers, aimed at customers conventional banks have not served.

Its acquisition of Tasaheel, a regulated consumer finance company, gave it a licensed lending vehicle and a compliance framework capable of surviving public market scrutiny.

The company is targeting a financing portfolio of between $4.5 billion and $5 billion by the end of this year, against $3.5 billion projected for 2025. Egyptian consumer finance volumes rose 57% to EGP 96.3 billion in 2025, while lending to micro, small and medium enterprises grew 24% to EGP 106.9 billion.

The listing would be only the second by an African unicorn on a public market, after Fawry, the Egyptian payments company that floated on the same exchange in 2019. Africa's other eight billion-dollar technology companies remain privately held, with Flutterwave repeatedly postponing a listing.

The EGX has risen close to 24% this year, driven by retail buying and domestic fund managers, with foreign institutional investors largely absent. A pipeline including Banque du Caire and Misr Life Insurance is expected to follow.

Neither MNT-Halan nor its advisers has confirmed a timetable.