#379 Emerging Market Fintech: Nader Abdelrazik’s Insights on Growth, Innovation, and Challenges

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Mehmet: Hello and welcome back to a new episode of the CTO Show with Mehmet today. I'm very pleased joining me. Nader Abdelrazik really, you know, I am appreciating the time. You are a busy CEO. Nader is the CEO of, uh, Moneyhash, [00:01:00] and I know how busy it can, but you took the time to be with me today, so thank you very much. You know, as usual is what I tell my guests, like, uh, I like them to tell us a little bit about, you know, their background, their journey, and what, uh, you are currently up to.

Mehmet: So the floor is your.

Nader: Amazing. No, thanks a lot to have me. It's, uh, it's usually really, uh, really exciting to, to take a break from work and kind of talk about it in the same time. So it's a semi break, I would say. Um, no, but in general, I really appreciate, uh, appreciate your work and excited to participate.

Nader: Uh, I'm Nader Abdelrazik. I'm one of the co founders of Uh, MoneyHash. We're a payment orchestration operation infrastructure. And what that means is we help companies control their payment infrastructure so that it's programmably and intelligently decide which transactions handled, how is the consumer and in the kitchen or in the back end of the business, how this works with the different payment [00:02:00] providers or the different partners to Post success rate to address fraud to address loyalty on multiple other things.

Nader: We, uh, it's a comprehensive operating system for payment prior to money. Hash my background is equally split. Between academia, where I spend most of my career, um, doing some studies and research and teaching. And this led me to switch to the business world. So I worked with a couple of startups in the region and globally before starting money hash with Uh, with my dear friend, Mustafa, who's, uh, who's our CTO.

Nader: And, uh, we're currently a seed stage company. We, we serve some of the larger enterprises in the region, fixing their payments and helping them, um, run a comprehensive payment strategy from a technical perspective. Um, and very excited to be with you today.

Mehmet: Thank you very much. Now that I get excited myself every time I have a founder from [00:03:00] our region, I'm big believer in the talent.

Mehmet: I'm big believer in the market. You know, so this is why myself. Also, I get excited when I have someone like yourself. Now, usually, maybe it's a traditional question, but I like to ask these every time to founders, you know, everything comes from a pain point that clients, you know, live with sometimes even they don't figure out that it's a pain until someone tells them, Hey, there's a better way of doing that.

Mehmet: So I would love to hear from you that, you know, the story of how, you know, you and most of your co founder came up with the idea of money hash. So what were the challenges you, you spotted? Uh, and you know, you decide, okay, this is We should be into to solve this problem.

Nader: No, 100%. I think, I think it's a mix between our excitement to solve this problem and our excitement [00:04:00] to, to build the companies that solves the problem.

Nader: So I think I can split why we started that into three, three main reasons. First one is Co founder synergy. So me and Mustafa work together in a payment company in Egypt called the X pay. And prior to starting money hash, uh, me and him were in between jobs, but really our work together in X pay was extremely, extremely enjoyable from, uh, from collaboration point of view and, and our impact of working together and all of that.

Nader: So there was a big incentive of us trying to figure out working together again, really, uh, because after all, like in the startup journey, If you really like the people you're working with, you can go a long way longer than others, right? So that was very important piece for us And the second piece as well.

Nader: We felt The region doesn't have enough, uh, technically driven companies. Like there is a lot of companies that are doing really well from an [00:05:00] operational perspective and has decent tech, but tech household software companies are not very few companies, um, that exist in the region and give, uh, opportunity to talents like myself and others to, to work on, um, Quality piece of software, you know, like cars exist, but like there's someone somewhere is dreaming of building a better car, uh, that's coming out of their own economy.

Nader: So this is kind of was our dream. Can we build a software company, a high quality software infrastructure software, complicated, exciting, solves a big problem from the region. These were two intangible incentives combined with the problem incentive, which is that we know COVID accelerated, uh, the digital payment space almost at 100x speed.

Nader: Um, that made the ecosystem overlook the significant problems in the payment ecosystem, which is, it's highly [00:06:00] fragmented. Uh, the technical of it is, uh, immature, has a lot of refinement. The emerging market is going through. Um, very difficult catch up with alternative payment methods versus global cards versus local cards.

Nader: What is the user preferences? What about my technical capacity? What about my product roadmap? It's a plumbing issue. And when you have a plumbing problem, you call a plumber. And we decided to be the best plumbers in, in payments in the region. Uh, and that was the problem we wanted to solve. We wanted to get companies a reliable piece of tech that intelligently manage a very, very important piece of infrastructure, which is the payments, receiving the money from the customers.

Nader: Um, and that's what we're working on.

Mehmet: Amazing. You know, I love these stories and maybe not related to the, to the technology, but you mentioned something also people underestimate sometimes, which is, you know, the synergy with the co founder or co [00:07:00] founders. This is very, very important. And the other thing is, uh, you know, the, uh, The passion to build a true software house now, I want to open a parenthesis and you know, this is something all my guests They know about me.

Mehmet: Sometimes I come up with questions. I didn't prepare but this has attracted You know me in a deep way. I would say Why do you think Nader although? We have a lot of startups, whether in FinTech or other, you know, uh, B2B SaaS and even B2C space. So do you think like the majority were trying just to take a proven business model, just like, you know, change it a little bit, localize it and push it.

Mehmet: So we don't care about, you know, the technicalities or is it You know, because we know that there is talent here in our region. What? Why do you think there is this lack in the ecosystem for true software house? To your point, I

Nader: think it's a lot off micro [00:08:00] forces that get combined together. I don't think there is a major, uh, A major reason for it.

Nader: I think definitely the region lagged a lot of, uh, gross stage funding that can carry big technical companies through the hard times. And this will will make a lot of companies kind of, uh, not survive, um, the tides off of building the company. I think also, um, even when we have a lot of Talented tech in the region, the region doesn't have a lot of success cases on building software that either go internationally or build the big market for it in the region.

Nader: This has started already with success cases like Unifonic or success cases like Instabug that we have, we're building on top of. of these success cases of like household softwares that started to emerge from uh, the region or doing well or doing things at, at scale. Um, but the region [00:09:00] doesn't have enough examples, uh, so things were a bit slow.

Nader: I think things are now picking up uh, on that. I think also there's a lot of positive things. Factors coming into place like the aspirate talent, for example, uh, so the aspirate talent in which like any, any very, uh, talented people that left the region to work outside of the region for a while for big households names like Google, Amazon or whatever.

Nader: And after 5, 10 years. They see an excitement to come back to the region while the region has a lot of injection of fund right now and contribute and become to lead their own startups or become significant levers to existing startups. Uh, that also is creating a wave of, of new generation. So I would say MoneyHash is built on top of these early tries, um, that while it looked like it's not successful, it was actually creating a fantastic fabric for us.

Nader: And we're now this generation of like just creating the new dent. Uh of like is it now possible to [00:10:00] get to make it to get larger and better instead of two three household names Can we get 50 100 if we can

Mehmet: hopefully we will hopefully So I like, you know, i'm very customer centric person. Like I work in tech.

Mehmet: I work in consultancy so for me like the customer journey neither when when they You know decide to go with with the money hash. So Like how it goes so today from what I understood from you and of course like when I Checked the website. So today if maybe I'm a retailer I might be an e commerce Owner whatever so I have like these different payment gateways and I have like I have to accept mastercard visa Stripe payments paypal and I have custom so when I want to and of course for each one There's a separate api and so on.

Mehmet: So now if I decide to choose You Uh, you know your platform money hash. What's my journey? Like how this is? Well, how it would take me from, you know, [00:11:00] where I am today to what you are promising.

Nader: No, 100%. 100%. You know, the, the, the beauty of any operating system or any, uh, or any comprehensive infrastructure is it needs to Take care of the customer across the entire journey.

Nader: So we help our businesses from the, whatever, wherever they are in the supply chain, of course, but let's assume they are going through all the problems. They are still choosing the payment partners. They're still building their integration. They're still having the checkout experience. They're still figuring out the programmability of the transactions.

Nader: They're still figuring out the reporting and the refunds. And our, uh, our software is built to handle all of this. So we have over 300 APIs pre integrated. That covers the entirety of Middle East and Africa. So we have, uh, all the way from card integrations and in Saudi and South Africa, Nigeria, Morocco to buy money to crypto [00:12:00] to, uh, buy now pay later integrations, all pre integrated.

Nader: On the one hand, you can, um, sign up through us to these wonderful partners and then through a single API integration. You access all of these integrations and, uh, as our team always call it, we turn it from an integration to a configuration, so it's no longer an integration problem. You just like configure another, uh, another partner in your stack.

Nader: But you do just a single integration on our side. So we help, we help the customer in the first journey, which is finding the partner, connecting with the partner, integrating with the partner and building this first API integration. But within this API integration, what people don't realize that the API integration itself has.

Nader: commitments in it and how the payment journey will look like for your user. So if you're using the right, the wrong API, the experience for the user will be, will be wrong. Um, and you, and you kind of like [00:13:00] how to have, how to patch it, think about it as like a, it's a water company. Uh, so this is the payment gateway.

Nader: So if you're connecting with the water company directly, and this connection is done wrong, you will not receive water correctly in your house. Right. So there should be a reliable pipe create this facilitation off of value in that case. So our API embedded in it. A lot of functionalities that help our customers build the decent payment experience built a very, very sophisticated payment experience.

Nader: Check out experience that customizes itself for based on customer segments based on the markets has a smart and dynamic. Way to show the brand and to show the payment methods and interact these payment methods to our payment orchestration engine, which is the engine that You program or set up ways to decide where the transaction will go What happens should I should I [00:14:00] do a fraud check not fraud check?

Nader: Should I do CDS? Should I skip CDS? Should it be Stripe or Checkout or Adyen? And what happens when the payment fails? What happens when the payment succeeds? When a payment fails, is this payment recoverable? And if it's recoverable, what to do next? And what the customer should see? We now empower the customer, the merchant that works with us.

Nader: to control every single small refinement from the journey of them building all the way towards the customer seeing and even the operations after that, like the refund and the reporting and all of that. So it is, it is quite comprehensive. From our point of view.

Mehmet: Fantastic. And I also, because I'm a big fan of automation.

Mehmet: So I've seen also you have put a lot of, uh, you know, automations, workflow optimization also for this journey, which is, you know, like, um, I talk a lot about, you know, How we can do this in shorter time. How we can do this in a more optimized way, like less friction. And I've seen like you've done fantastic job, [00:15:00] neither on this.

Mehmet: Now, one thing also I get to know about like, which is, I think it's a great milestone, uh, with, which is the partnership with Visa, um, the, the, the car, the very famous, uh, card company. So what this milestone means to, to, to money hash and like how this will affect, you know, the way you do business.

Nader: I think I think is a milestone means to us and and to the ecosystem in general that the payment ecosystem is graduating.

Nader: It's kind of like going from the bachelor level to the master's level. And what I mean by that is usually is a merchant consumes. The entire understanding of payment from the payment providers and from payment part and the schemes are kind of an ecosystem player in the back end. So Visa, MasterCard, and even the local schemes like Visa in Egypt or Mada in Saudi, they [00:16:00] facilitate.

Nader: The playing between the issuer banks and the acquirer bank and the merchant and the customer and all of these different middle, uh, middle players that add value in different, uh, in different ways. So when we come to the market and we start adding another layer of value of consolidation and automation and intelligence, um, we got to also gain the trust of the ecosystems that we can deliver to the deepest level.

Nader: of complication of cases, especially when you deal with large enterprise. So by partnering with Visa and MasterCard, you now get an access to, um, an open ecosystem of information of capabilities that the merchants usually didn't know they exist, or they know that exists through an abstraction layer, which is a Uh, the payment gateway or the payment service, and they now can pick and choose what they want to refine, what they want to do, and how they want to scale, uh, to that level of granularity, uh, if that makes sense.

Nader: Uh, and it's also a testament [00:17:00] to the team because we are, uh, one of the very first orchestrators even globally to partner. with the card scheme. So the, that's one of the things we're proud of that like coming from our region, the emerging market, that we are not catching up with an industry. We're actually in the, uh, in the front of it is a good, is a good thing to, to, uh, to be proud of.

Mehmet: Of course, like I think this is should be everyone in the emerging markets would be proud off of such accomplishment. And again, congratulations, neither on this. Now we've been speaking about, you know, emerging market and fintech. So how have you seen, you know, the fintech in general landscape in Africa and the Middle East in MENA region?

Mehmet: Um, you know, have evolved in in in the past decade. Like you mentioned, like there's a break point, of course, which was the covid. But, you know, how have you seen this evolution? And, you know, and this is a question that maybe I'm merging two [00:18:00] questions together, but I think they are related. Some people, they say, You know, we have a surge in the FinTech.

Mehmet: Do we really need all these FinTech, you know, startups? And it does really the emerging market need all these, you know, solutions, or do you see maybe in the future there will be some consolidation in that space?

Nader: Uh, I will go 100 percent against what's commonly being said in that file. And they will think we're even not 1 percent there.

Nader: Uh, and there is way, way more fintechs that need to emerge than than that. Um, listen, the fintech infrastructure globally is really less than 1 percent built. It's really, uh, not much is being built there. There's so much. Uh, to, to build and so much to test and so much to experiment and it can be presented to the consumer in so many flavors and the venture game has a lot to do with building a competitive market.

Nader: And that's through the [00:19:00] competition and through the, uh, uh, the work between these different players with the different flavors, you get, you get winners and losers and laggards and followers like any other ecosystem. So do we need that many robo advisory companies? Yes, we need as many robo advisory, as many challenger banks, as many insured tech, as many, uh, remittances, as many beer to beer, as many B2B payments, as many billing payments.

Nader: Um, but as long as the old can figure out the differentiation and the approach to the market, we got to embrace that some of them will fail for the good of the entire ecosystem from a success point of view, uh, and to improve the quality of others. You gotta build competitive space. Uh, and that's what we tell to our investors as well.

Nader: Like we are, we are the first payment orchestrator in the region and one of the leading ones, giving our integration network and our number of features we have and our hyperlocalization [00:20:00] competition is coming and there will be multiple orchestrators or multiple payment companies. And we gotta be very excited about that because that will push us and make us better.

Nader: Uh, and make us learn and the customer will be winning in there.

Mehmet: Absolutely. So, uh, you know, competition is always welcome to push, you know, for the way for the benefits of the customer. So this is a hundred percent now shifting little bit gears here. Now that I got to talk about the, the investment. I, I prefer usually to keep it to the end.

Mehmet: But, you know, for you, like on, on, on the personal journey. So you mentioned like you started in academia and then you worked in consultancy. So this shift to the complete startup world, like how much, you know, you know, the background in economics, your background also, you know, in engineering and how this all helped you to, to shape, you know, the way to be a, a founder for.

Mehmet: A company [00:21:00] like now money hashes is taking, you know, more and more steps towards becoming a leader in the space that it's in. And to your point, like probably others will follow, but I mean this shift, you know, because some, some of the people, they are comfortable in their comfort zone, you know, like they said, okay, I like to do this.

Mehmet: So how was this transition for you? I

Nader: mean, it was, it's a double edged sword because giving that I did a lot of in academia. I did a lot of shopping because they actually learned a lot of different fields, right? So I switched from the engineering to management and then from management to to economics and political science as well.

Nader: And when you blend all of these together, It really lends itself well to, to strategy. So I work really well or my comfort zone is building strategy, building frameworks, building processes. And it's a double edged sword because you have a kind of, uh, an example of skills that they can use together [00:22:00] to bring something different and sometimes take for granted and don't realize how this is powerful for, for myself and for the company, and sometimes it can also slow me down because I have too much in my head about everything or I can over process.

Nader: Uh, a little bit. So you gotta balance yourself. And this is even for all for all founders. Hopefully everyone do that. You gotta balance yourself with the team that you have, that they kind of balance you in the degree of processing, balance you in the speed, in the execution, in the background. So that you can, you can bring, bring a full picture, uh, horizontally and vertically in terms of like topics and in terms of, uh, between the strategy and implementation and, and what's in, in between.

Nader: Uh, but I gotta say that, uh, the startup ecosystem doesn't have enough, uh, from the skillset of coming from like an economics or an engineering economics blend. So that's helpful in some way, because we're working in [00:23:00] the payment ecosystem and we're building the companies that is bad regional. So looking at the macro and being able to to move seamlessly between the macro and the micro is very, uh, it's very key piece to how to we build the company in the beginning.

Nader: So we kind of embraced this as a DNA of the company that. Our skill set is complicated and diverse, so we're going to build a complicated and diverse product because we can, um, and we should, so that's part of our, our mandate.

Mehmet: To your last point, Nader, because I think also, you know, there is a lot of talks that happens mainly on LinkedIn, you know, there are some people who are active thought leaders about the startup ecosystem in MENA.

Mehmet: One time, you know, I am one of the big believer and I believe MENA region, all of the MENA region, I'm not saying only like UAE or only Saudi or only one specific country. I say like, uh, Cairo is, it can be a global hub. Dubai is a global hub can be, or it is on the way of being a global hub. [00:24:00] Every single capital in the whole emerging market.

Mehmet: I did, you know, I was wondering, you know, and because this is what you mentioned about the academia and, you know, how you took this, one of the things that I wanted to study what made, for example, Silicon Valley, the Silicon Valley, of course, there are a lot of things. Capital was there, this and that. But it was, you know, the academia, which actually were behind, you know, all this.

Mehmet: If we think about You know, a company like Google, just to mention one. So, you know, Sergio and Larry, they were like PhD students and they were working on their project. And of course, Stanford, you know, from your experience, do you think like the higher education is, of course, there are a lot of initiatives.

Mehmet: I don't want to, you know, underestimate, but do you think, you know, you should, we should do all more in this space, you know, what is missing, Nader, for us to really take this to really the next stage?

Nader: I think. [00:25:00] And this is one of my incentives of, of getting out of the higher education system, which I really like.

Nader: I really enjoyed being in it. So I love teaching. I love research. There was a reason why I got into academia in the first place. I think the, the global world is going through, uh, Something called like a social acceleration in which like technology is moving much faster from a base perspective that everyone is behind academia is behind the economy is behind the politicians are behind right if you're going to watch the Congress question, a technical CEO and in the US, you will realize that there is like a big, big gap between where where is the politics and where is the economics and where is the old systems we build are.

Nader: And where's the technology and where's the economy is actually heading in that space. So I kind of believe that there's so many academic institutions are far behind. Some of them has big brands and big names that they can [00:26:00] collaborate better with tech and engage better with tech. Uh, And the rest of are all in in the direction of like talent, race and on all of that, I'm really hoping to see more initiatives from, uh, academia of starting building academia differently, like starting building different universities, starting building more entrepreneurial universities, more research driven university, more incubating business, incubating universities, uh, some universities around the world that call themselves that name, but eventually they still fall into The oldest structure of academia, uh, and, and the old hierarchy of academia, which is in of itself is the ones that I think need to be challenged.

Nader: Uh, but I can say the same exact things on politics and economics and how we treat. The entire, um, the entire thinking of, of the society when it comes to how we, we process tech, right? Like we're all like now about to be customers [00:27:00] of AI or we are already customers of AI before, before even the societies discuss if they want to be customers of AI, but this is the speed we're moving in like the speed in which the technology presents things and the entire society catch up on the conversation after adoption.

Nader: That's the level of how late we are, right? Um, so there is, there is a degree of balance to figure out some pioneers here and there, but the majority is still, is still far behind in my opinion.

Mehmet: Hopefully things will change, uh, because to your point, if we don't do something now, I don't know when, when we're going to do it because things are moving very, very, very fast.

Mehmet: And the gap, yeah, it's unfortunately good enough. You know, I'm, I'm sometimes feel lucky at least here, you know, In, in, in the Gulf region and you know, in the whole MENA region, there are these initiatives, let's adopt the technology, let everyone knows what we are doing. So this is, this is really, really great.

Mehmet: Now, one [00:28:00] other thing that always comes, you know, in the discussions about the startup ecosystem. And again, I have the debate with some of the thought leaders, like online and offline. You know, the impression is what we do as a startup team. Founders and ecosystem. We are trying to take, you know, business models from successful companies in the U S or in Europe.

Mehmet: And we start these ideas here on the hope that we are being in the future acquired by a bigger player now. And we are blamed. And then I say, we, I think sometimes we self blame ourself. You know what? I will never become a global company. I just gonna, you know, grow the business. I'm covering, you know, I'm in my comfort zone again covering me the region emerging market Hopefully someone from the us from canada from europe will come and acquire me and they are saying that we don't have enough [00:29:00] Founders who are thinking on a global level to say, No, actually, I want to go out and push my product in the U.

Mehmet: S. in Europe, in Asia, and maybe I gonna start to do acquisitions in their local market. Why do you think this is? Not happening now that I'm a big believer that it will happen at some stage, not sure when, but what do we need to do to reach that stage?

Nader: I mean, first, there is a very important piece to highlight, which is like any, any economy, any ecosystem has stages of development.

Nader: And if this stage of development we're in, that's fine. Like we should, we should just embrace it and be, be okay with it because it's one form of growth. It's one form of innovation. No judgment against it. Let's say it is dominant, but it's not nothing against it in general. It's a good way to build. If you're going to hyper localize a model that is global or hyper distributed, [00:30:00] so you're going to hyper localize the product or hyper distributed or figure out.

Nader: Something that is local, but it's still the same model or something. There is no judgment on that. It's in fact, it's a very hard task, extremely hard task to do that, uh, in general and to get acquired by an international company. I mean, even if that's what everyone is trying to do, I mean, It's not as successful.

Nader: We don't have enough acquisitions, uh, in the region, uh, in the region yet. Uh, can, can a lot of companies become global from the region? I think they can, uh, are they not becoming that because lack of founders thinking that? No, I think most founders, if not all hoping for that. Um, and there is, uh, bumps along the road, inner bumps and external bumps.

Nader: Founders might not have the skillset to do it. Uh, their teams might not have the skillset suit, they might not get the right support. Um, so there is a lot of barriers to break and I think each company [00:31:00] break some on behalf of the rest. Uh, in that case, uh, given that I'm Egyptian, we have a lot of, uh, gross stage Egyptian companies that what they achieved in the last five years.

Nader: going through like multiple devaluations and political turbulence in the country for them to be in the level they are should be a case study globally for the level they achieved when we talk about companies like, uh, bread fast or money fellows or now we, uh, in the middle of everything they have been through extremely heavily operational companies, uh, coming from the Egyptian economy.

Nader: And be the are what they are. Uh, these are, uh, fantastic level founders. Um, and there is a lot of other founders that Builds the ecosystem for us, whether it's the founders of Rise Up or, uh, the [00:32:00] founders of Inventus or like, uh, the founders of p os Rocket ary, like, which, like the, the ones that led that help us see acquisitions or help us the ecosystem.

Nader: Or all of that. So is this changing? It is changing. Is the ecosystem thriving? It is thriving. Um, but we still need as many acquisitions as possible in the region. We need small acquisitions, big acquisitions. We need some, uh, open failures. We don't have enough open failures. And which people talk about like, actually we screwed this up.

Nader: This is not working and we're going to share the story because we now have this like, uh, um, collective toxicity that we can't openly say this company failed and why it failed and how and, and what we're doing next and, and, and all of that, uh, and it will be very, very, very exciting to see in the region at some point, uh, and we need all of that, whether it's the acquisitions piece or, or the rest.

Mehmet: 100%. And again, like, I'm not against like [00:33:00] a local company being acquired, but I would love to see the opposite happening. And to your point, you mentioned a couple of startup names. And personally, especially since last year, when I, you know, started to, you know, immerse myself more into the ecosystem, you know, the amount of talent, the amount of the thing that The people are building in the tough situations that you just mentioned, whether it's like economical situations, sometimes instabilities and so on, or even, even, you know, in the more like comfortable economies, like in the UAE and Saudi and so on, you know, we have major talents and this talent should not go, you know, just.

Mehmet: Like this to the sea as we say in Arabic, you know, uh, you mentioned about the support Like is it let's let's I like to talk it openly. Is it because we don't have enough Investors in the region. Is it because the investors they need just something that comes on the you know As we say on a plate of uh of gold to them, you know, and they just something cooked 100 [00:34:00] guaranteed and then okay We're gonna we're gonna invest is this what we are missing neither here

Nader: I think there is, there isn't enough, uh, growth stage funds in the region and the early stage funds in the region are quite aggressive in the expectation from early stage company.

Nader: Uh, that's, that's factual. That is like, if you ask any other founder, I don't think they will see it any, any differently. Uh, majority of them has to pitch attractions that would be expected from a pre series A company. And when they make it to the growth stage, they are picking from very few funds that has the appetite and goes through a lot of diligence and things like that, uh, will this change?

Nader: I think so. I think the region is attracting more funds externally and more funds in the region are changing the DNA and getting more progressive about things and getting more founder friendly, that is exciting. But this is just like in its first 10 percent in full honesty.

Mehmet: Yeah, [00:35:00] we still need a lot of time like although like if maybe you know Let me ask you another if I ask you about your you know in your domain the market size How much is it?

Mehmet: Like how big is the is the time? Let's say

Nader: I mean You mean the time of my my oh, yeah Yeah. So for you,

Mehmet: just as an example, because I'm going to ask another question. So

Nader: I believe it's gigantic without saying an exact. Yeah, I believe it's in

Mehmet: billions. It's in billions. Yeah. And you know, like the point I want to make now, there is, for example, let's, if we take FinTech, right.

Mehmet: And if we take only the emerging market, which is mainly the Middle East and Africa, right. And Yeah. Very And And I didn't talk about Latam. I didn't talk about like some of the emerging markets in Asia. It's a huge market. So growth. Yes, there is growth. And you know what irritates me? And you know, I'm very transparent on this podcast.

Mehmet: Like, despite like we have all these numbers, You know, the [00:36:00] number one complaint from founders I spoke with recently is exactly what you mentioned. So everyone, everyone knows that these guys are solving real problem. Everyone knows that these guys, they have the talent. Everyone knows the market is big and is growing yet.

Mehmet: They are being unfortunately asked these questions, which sometimes no sense. So hopefully, so hopefully this will change very soon. Uh, and I believe, you know, like if people who are missing these, uh, opportunities, they're going to come back and say, Oh, wow, like we missed that opportunity. Because I believe, you know, we, we are on the verge of a big transformation when it comes to the startup ecosystem.

Mehmet: And, you know, for me, I'm maybe doing a, uh, you know, drop in, in a ocean in Canada. Kind of pushing people. So hopefully these things will change. Now, I want to come back to, to, to something related to, to you Nadir, which is, you know, starting a business and being in the startup is not [00:37:00] something easy. And one of the things that they see or need to do is to, of course, put the vision and, you know, build the culture and, you know, take care of the business.

Mehmet: For you, like, Are I would say maybe the methodologies, maybe the tools that you have equipped yourself with so to make sure that, you know, all the tasks that they see you have to do go smoothly, especially in a tough market like ours.

Nader: Yeah, no, a hundred percent, a hundred percent. I think, I think all founders are different.

Nader: You kind of got to double down on the things you're, you're good at and, and fill. Uh, fills the cracks in the things you're, you're not good at. So I think like my own rubric wouldn't make sense for other rubrics. Right. Um, and there is some common wisdom that you take it, but you got to kind of like synthesize it and reflect it on like.

Nader: So if people are telling you like, Oh, [00:38:00] go, go hire people yourself. Don't do like hiring campaigns. Well, if you're not good at hiring, then this is a bad advice. Right? So like, that's a part in which like the common wisdom has to reflect on your, your own vulnerabilities and what's, what's you, what you feel comfortable with and what you feel you still need to learn and what you feel you should delegate and stuff.

Nader: In my case, personally, I, uh, I do believe, especially on, on. Trusting senior talent. I feel like that's a contract, a social contract. Um, so I, I, I really did my best on us, not actually recruiting anyone in a critical position that I didn't reach out to them myself and, uh, talk to them and get them on board without a recruiting campaign or anything like, uh, so many of the positions you will see in the, uh, In the sea level or managerial positions are we we went and hired them directly [00:39:00] and found the talents we want ourselves without saying we're actually hiring and a reason for that is, uh, as I said, it says it's we take it quite religiously that this is a social contract.

Nader: These are other co founders that will join. There's a big journey, daunting journey, hard journey. Um, so there is a marriage component to it that you gotta, you gotta figure out. So this is one of the things that if you're a founder, that is good in, uh, communicating your vision to other talent and, and reading other people and figuring out if they, uh, if they are fit to work with you and you can establish a decent social contract with them.

Nader: Uh, I would recommend for you to to head hunt and approach your critical talent rather than waste your time on on recruiting, um, campaign. So this is one of the things I set up from day one and we, we kind of doubled down a lot, uh, a lot on it. Um, I think also one, uh, very decent [00:40:00] advice. Uh, that I received from some.

Nader: So we, we have a lot of angel investors in our cap table, uh, that we, we consider them really, really helpful advisors and friends. Some of them are founders themselves. Um, so one advice I received was, uh, to invest in middle management early because a lot of time you're being, you're being pushed to think that all what you need is like, Okay.

Nader: Junior mid level kind of talent to execute, but all the leadership level, uh, is needed from you in the early stage. But in reality, you need to fill the cracks on your strategy, weak, weak spots, and also build the infrastructures that would grow with you. Um, so this is one of the very critical pieces, like invest in middle management early, make sure you have leaders with you in the company to, To balance you to help you grow and to also scale the company on your behalf, which is [00:41:00] fantastic.

Nader: And then a third component that was really good for us is, uh, to avoid nickel and diming as much as you can. Uh, so founders, especially in the region, uh, are, uh, are really pushed to Rethink every single penny, right? Uh, this campaign will cost 500 versus 1, 000. So they can like spend a lot of time trying to optimize every single piece of cost while what they don't understand they are in a race.

Nader: And they got to only optimize the things that are critical, the things that are huge, and try to not get into the nitty gritty details of everything, and try to balance between being wise and burning and, um, and their capacity as well. Uh, so they gotta they gotta pay their talents. Well, they gotta use use tools early, even if it looks expensive.

Nader: Um, it will [00:42:00] pay off eventually.

Mehmet: That's fantastic. And, you know, great advice also as well. I would say for fellow entrepreneurs, you know, who Our thinking to go out and start building, um, in our region, in the emerging market, uh, which is a market that I believe it has a lot of, uh, again, potential. I'm repeating this again and again.

Mehmet: Now that really, I enjoyed, you know, the conversation with you today. You know, if you want to say some final things and also where people can get in touch and know more about you and about money has

Nader: no 100%. Listen, I think Um, and I'm hoping the audience while we're talking already opened moneyhash. io and kind of check stuff if you need, like giving that the technical crowd, if anyone needs an input in payments, even if, if money hash is not the one to solve it for you, we're just happy to be help.

Nader: We're just happy to discuss whatever you need and, and, and figure it out. So reach out. [00:43:00] To reach out if you have any any questions about payments in general even Uh, and if you are a founder in the early in the early stages in the stages before me Uh, and and would like to reach out for any input would love would love to help you tell you how it went

Mehmet: Great.

Mehmet: Thank you very much Nader. As I said, I really appreciate busy time for a founder like yourself Um, and especially and again, congratulations on all the achievement that you have done so far. And I'm sure, you know, the future is bright for you and for the rest of the team at MoneyHash. For the audience, you know, you can find the link, it's moneyhash.

Mehmet: io, but you will find it in the show notes, or if you are watching this on YouTube, it's in the description. Um, and as I say, at the end of each episode. This is for the audience. If you just discovered this podcast by luck, thank you for passing by. Please, if you like it, subscribe, share it with your friends and colleagues.

Mehmet: I'm trying to do some impact here and I'm trying to share as much as possible founder stories, tech leader [00:44:00] stories, and so on. And if you are one of the loyal followers, thank you very much for sending me your comments and sending your encouragements. I really appreciate that. Keep come, keep them coming.

Mehmet: And as I say, Thank you very much for tuning in. We'll meet again very soon. Thank you. Bye. Bye