Fintech Amwal has secured $2.5 million in a pre-Seed round co-led by Shorooq Partners and Outliers Venture Capital with angel investors. Amwal aims to improve the way money gets authenticated worldwide. By abstracting device identity, fraud prevention, and payment tokenisation in a single API, Amwal has built a cryptographic biometric checkout solution.
According to the startup, every day in Mena, there are more than 50 million online transactions (e-commerce, bank-bank transfer, wallet, or remittance). The current way to authenticate them is a mix of outmoded credential-based (passwords) and (sms OTPs). These factors are frictional, phishable, and costly to maintain and distribute. “It is one of the first implementations of multi-device authentication tokens (FIDO-passkeys) for payments. By removing the friction of account creation, shipping address, payment details, and authentication, Amwal is enabling its network of merchants to increase their checkout conversion by 35%,” shared co-founder and CEO Mohamed Zaghoo.
Amwal says it is looking to improve the authentication and authorization for the Mena $250 billion payment market. Amwal biometric checkout is licensed from Saudi payments (Saudi Central Bank). “We are extremely proud to join Amwal’s journey in revolutionising the authentication and processing infrastructure for payments in the region and beyond. As part of Shorooq Partners’ fintech infrastructure thesis, we strongly share the founders’ belief that the future of online payments is identity-powered, and by building on Amwal’s novel technology, we can establish new rails of secure and seamless flow of funds that will propel trade on a global scale,” concluded Mahmoud Adi, founding partner of Shorooq Partners.
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