Valu and the Discipline Engine

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Earlier this week, Valu became the first consumer finance company to list on the Egyptian Exchange. Trading under the ticker VALU.CA, shares surged 852% on their debut, closing at EGP 7.40, well above the reference price of EGP 0.78 and hitting the upper limit allowed on day one. As of the time of publication, it’s currently trading at EGP 8.89.

The move marks one of the most anticipated market entries in recent memory, not only for what it says about Egypt’s capital markets, but for what it reveals about how far Valu has come, and how deliberately it’s been built.

Unlike a traditional IPO, this was a direct listing executed via dividend in kind, which is a fancy way of saying that EFG Holding shareholders received roughly 20.5% of Valu’s equity in lieu of cash, with EFG retaining a 67% stake.

And if things weren’t already fascinating enough, on the eve of listing, Amazon quietly converted a long-standing option into a 3.95% stake, giving the $2+ trillion behemoth a direct slice of some MENA fintech pie.

Needless to say, the route to the EGX has been unconventional: there was no roadshow, no price discovery – just a public float, a traded ticker, and now a test of market conviction.

Valu now enters the public markets with a valuation that will very likely prove conservative (i.e. good value!). The company is profitable, capital-efficient, and growing faster than its domestic consumer finance peers.

It has spent a number of years steadily building infrastructure: securitisation rails, product density, risk systems, and distribution layers that allow it to compound both usage and economics across multiple categories.

In the chapters that follow, we’ll dig sillily deep into the company’s strategy. We’ll tee-up Egypt’s consumer finance market: the structural headwinds, the latent demand, the competitive terrain. We’ll break down Valu’s product portfolio, mapping how it has evolved, where it has doubled down, and how its unit economics actually function. We’ll look at the company’s management philosophy, its hiring principles, and its meritocratic internal culture. We’ll examine the new cap table post-listing (hello Amazon), and the implications for governance and capital allocation moving forward.

We’ll go into the financial weeds to test the real strength of the business. We’ll ask why this timing matters, what the listing unlocks, and whether the valuation is conservative or ambitious, whether this is the floor or the ceiling. And finally, we’ll examine the company’s positioning in full, weighing its enduring advantages against the risks that still remain.

Conventional startup lore might lead you to imagine Valu emerging from a garage on the outskirts of Cairo, sustained by nothing but koshary and ambition, but that’s not how this story begins. On the contrary, Valu was born inside the walls of EFG Hermes, an origin that may not scream hustle or risk, but shouldn’t be held against it either.

If anything, that context makes what followed even more striking. Valu wasn’t born of frictionless founder fantasy but built inside a legacy institution, in one of the most structurally difficult markets in the world, during a time of economic instability, political uncertainty, and deep institutional distrust. That it emerged not just functional but genuinely innovative, and more than that, widely adopted with 25% market share, says something significant about the people behind it. After going deep on everything I could find – the interviews, the financials, the offhand remarks buried in marathon-length podcasts – I’ve come away with a clear view: this story is worth mythologising.

Over the past few years, Valu has had to navigate macro conditions that most fintech operators in developed markets would consider unworkable. It operates in a country where credit penetration remains low, credit scoring infrastructure is largely absent, and the financial system tends to exclude the very customers Valu is built to serve. In Egypt, underwriting isn’t just about balancing risk and reward. It means making calls in the dark, in a market where data is patchy, touchpoints are fragmented, and formal banking systems have historically fallen short.

And yet, within those constraints, Valu found product-market fit. It certainly helped that the business was incubated within EFG, but proximity to capital and institutional support alone doesn’t explain the culture that has taken hold there. It doesn’t explain the unorthodox hiring, the refusal to take external VC funding despite repeated offers, or the clarity of mission that has kept the company tightly focused. That sensibility, the refusal to overextend, to dilute, to chase growth for its own sake, comes from CEO Walid Hassouna. And Walid, for all his institutional pedigree, is not your typical banker.

If you want to understand Valu, you have to understand him, and his path is anything but run-of-the-mill…

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