eNovate, a subsidiary of eFinance Investment Group, and Cobi, a UAE-headquartered AI-native customer intelligence platform, have entered into a strategic partnership to integrate AI-powered intelligence across Egypt’s digital payment ecosystem
The collaboration, enabled through Mastercard’s Engage programme, is designed to redefine how young people across Egypt engage with digital financial services. By combining eNovate’s payment suite with Cobi’s engagement platform, financial institutions will gain access to a new level of intelligence, personalisation, and behavioural insight.
Targeting the youth segment with ‘Rize’
The initiative will initially roll out through the Rize app, eNovate’s flagship digital wallet. Cobi’s intelligence layer will be used to power real-time personalisation specifically tailored for Egypt’s youth segment.
At the core of the partnership is Cobi’s behavioural AI engine, which operates by:
- Building deep context on how users engage.
- Identifying patterns in spending behaviour.
- Recommending or triggering “next-best-actions” across customer acquisition, activation, and retention journeys.
Following this initial deployment in Q1 2026, the capability will be extended across eNovate’s broader digital payment services. This expansion aims to form Egypt’s first large-scale AI-driven portfolio management infrastructure.
Capitalising on MENA’s digital shift
The partnership capitalises on a rapidly evolving financial landscape in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Currently, 85 per cent of people across the MENA region use at least one emerging payment method. Furthermore, the MENA region’s AI in financial services market is projected to reach $4.7billion by 2032, highlighting the massive scale of opportunity for data-driven payment infrastructure.
Nashwa Kamel, CEO of eNovate, commented on the strategic value of the launch: “Partnering with Cobi allows us to introduce real-time intelligence into every digital wallet and payment experience we support, starting with the youth-focused Rize app. This collaboration strengthens our mission to provide Egypt with the most advanced and responsive payment infrastructure that provides insights into spend behaviour, helping banks & financial institutions to spot inefficiencies, optimize costs, and make smarter, data-driven decisions.”
Darren Edmund, CEO of Cobi, added: “By embedding Cobi as the intelligence layer across eNovate’s ecosystem, we are enabling banks and financial platforms to move beyond static transaction processing toward real-time, adaptive systems that understand and respond to user behaviour instantly. This allows institutions to personalise at scale, optimise portfolio performance, and build deeper, longer-lasting customer relationships.”
Looking further ahead, the partnership plans to expand into “agentic payment experiences”. In this future phase, AI will not only analyse user behaviour but autonomously recommend or initiate actions designed to improve financial outcomes for users across the region.
