Dubai-based financial services firm Mamo has raised $4.3 million in new funding.
Founded in 2019, the company offers services such as payment collection, corporate cards and expense management for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
“Mamo’s mission is to empower people to manage and grow their money through simpler, faster and friendlier finance,” Mamo wrote on LinkedIn last week.
“This newly raised capital will help expand the depth of Mamo’s SME-facing product offering within the UAE and support regional expansion.”
PYMNTS spoke with Mamo CEO Imad Gharazeddine in 2022 about the rise of peer-to-peer (P2P) payments in the UAE and other countries in the Middle East/North Africa (MENA) region.
“SMEs are tired of cash-on-delivery because of the operational hassles associated with it,” Gharazeddine told PYMNTS. For example, if you deliver products or services and your customer comes to make a payment and they don’t have the right change, you have to send your driver back and forth a few times.”
He added that most of the demand and interest his company is seeing on the market lies in SME payments because of the sheer frequency and volume of those payments, even as digital wallets for individuals were gaining traction.
“On the P2P side, you may have the need to pay back a friend maybe two or three times a week at most, but on the business payments side, we have customers who transact up to 500 times a month, so that pain point immediately gets multiplied by 500, which makes it a far more compelling problem to solve,” he noted.
In other SME news, PYMNTS wrote recently about the potential for embedded lending opportunities for micro and small businesses (MSBs) in the U.S.
Recent research by PYMNTS Intelligence and Visa shows modest interest among U.S. lenders in expanding their embedded lending offerings. Fifteen percent of lenders surveyed said they were very or extremely interested in rolling out new embedded lending products for consumers, with that figure climbing to 18% on the MSB side.
“The fact that only about 1 in 6 lenders indicates strong interest reflects a missed opportunity and points to challenges — whether perceived or actual — that embedded lending providers should seek to address,” PYMNTS wrote.
