Egypt’s financial regulator has ordered consumer-finance companies to connect their databases to its own and to send it what their customers buy as they buy it.
Decision No. 2684 of 2026, announced on 24 September by Islam Azzam, chairman of the Financial Regulatory Authority (FRA), requires licensed consumer-finance companies to build the technical link. The FRA says it will issue the detailed controls within 6 months.
What the lenders must hand over
The FRA’s statement lists these categories of data:
- data on each customer as soon as financing is approved
- the customer’s purchases of goods and services, in real time
- the classification of the goods and services the company finances
- the classification of customers by how regularly they repay
- the company’s own solvency data and indicators
Linking the databases “strengthens the Authority’s supervisory and regulatory tools” and “supports early detection” of problems, Azzam said, according to the FRA’s Arabic statement.
A market of 10.8 million borrowers
The decision reaches a large and fast-growing market. The FRA’s own figures show 48 licensed consumer-finance companies lending more than EGP 96.3 billion (about $1.9 billion) to over 10.8 million customers in 2025, 57% more than the year before.
Consumer finance of this kind, paying for goods and services in instalments, is the same model buy-now-pay-later startups elsewhere on the continent are raising money to build. In Egypt it sits within a fintech sector that also includes investment platforms such as Thndr, which partnered with Huawei Cloud in June.
It also goes a step beyond the regulator’s earlier data rules. In September 2025, the FRA required non-bank finance companies to report approved credit limits to I-Score, Egypt’s credit bureau, immediately rather than at month-end, and barred them from charging fees on limits customers do not use.
That was credit data sent to a bureau. The new decision sends purchase-level data directly to the regulator.
What the statement does not say
The FRA’s announcement makes no reference to customer consent, data protection, how long it will keep the data, or who inside or outside the regulator can see it. Nor does it say how finely purchases will be recorded, a question the controls due within 6 months should answer.
The timing sits close to Egypt’s own data protection deadline. The Personal Data Protection Law, Law 151 of 2020, only gained its executive regulations in November 2025, and law firms advising on it describe a one-year grace period for organisations to comply. The FRA’s statement does not say how its new data link relates to that law.
For lenders, the decision means building a live connection to the regulator, on terms the FRA has yet to set. For borrowers, it means a record of what they buy on credit will reach the regulator as the purchase happens, under rules that have yet to be written.
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