Raya Holding Launches Raya Nexus, an Enterprise AI Company for MENA Banks and Fintechs

Raya Holding for Financial Investments has launched Raya Nexus, a new wholly owned company that will build enterprise artificial intelligence solutions for banks and fintech companies across the Middle East and North Africa.

The Cairo-listed investment group announced the launch in September, positioning Raya Nexus as the newest addition to a portfolio that already spans technology, financial services, and outsourcing. The company enters the market with EGP 250 million in issued capital and EGP 30 million paid in, a signal that Raya intends to fund the venture for scale rather than run it as an experiment.

Raya Nexus will sell AI tools that handle credit decisioning, collections, customer value management, and customer engagement. The target customer is clear: banks and fintechs operating in Arabic-speaking markets, where off-the-shelf AI products built for Western markets often fall short on language, regulation, and local business practice.

Built on Raya’s operating businesses

Raya Nexus does not start from zero. It draws on the group’s accumulated experience across information technology, financial services, fintech, outsourcing, and customer experience, converting that operating knowledge into AI products.

The connection to the existing portfolio is direct. Aman, Raya’s fintech arm, runs microfinance, consumer finance, and e-payments operations across Egypt. Raya CX, the group’s customer experience business, operates contact centers and business process outsourcing across Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and beyond, employing around 8,000 people. Both businesses generate the kind of operational data and domain expertise that enterprise AI companies typically spend years acquiring.

Riyadh debut signals GCC ambitions

Raya Nexus made its regional debut in Riyadh alongside Money20/20 Middle East 2026, the region’s flagship fintech gathering. The choice of venue was deliberate: Saudi Arabia sits at the center of the company’s expansion plans, which start with Egypt and the GCC.

The timing aligns with a broader push. Financial institutions across the Gulf are investing heavily in AI for risk assessment, fraud detection, and customer service, while regulators in Saudi Arabia and the UAE have created frameworks that encourage responsible AI adoption in banking.

The Arabic-language gap

One of Raya Nexus’s clearest differentiators is its focus on Arabic-speaking markets. Enterprise AI adoption in the region has been held back by tools that perform poorly in Arabic, and by models that lack context on local business norms. At Money20/20, the company demonstrated voice interaction experiences in Arabic and the Saudi dialect, a nod to how much linguistic nuance matters in customer-facing AI.

By building for these markets from the start, Raya Nexus positions itself against global AI vendors that treat the region as an afterthought. The company’s pitch is that AI built on Raya’s regional operating data will outperform generic models on the tasks banks actually care about: deciding who gets credit, collecting what is owed, and keeping customers engaged.

What comes next

Raya Holding’s board approved the company’s formation in May 2026, and the September launch formalized its place in the portfolio. The group has a track record of building portfolio companies into standalone businesses: Raya Information Technology and Raya CX both grew out of the group’s operations before taking on lives of their own.

For now, Raya Nexus remains wholly owned by Raya Holding. The near-term test will be whether it can convert the group’s relationships with banks and fintechs into paying customers, first in Egypt and then across the Gulf. If it succeeds, Raya will have added an AI-native business to a portfolio that has spent more than 25 years accumulating the data and domain expertise to power one.