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botim Money Links With TerraPay For Africa Transfers
The UAE remittance arm of the company will add real-time wallet checks and instant payouts across four separate African markets.
botim money has plugged into TerraPay’s global payments infrastructure, widening its remittance reach from the UAE into a set of African markets and adding real-time recipient checks before cash moves.
The integration lets users send funds through direct bank deposits or straight to mobile wallets, with account details validated upfront to reduce failed or delayed transfers. The change is live, according to the company.
Initial payment corridors include Uganda, Kenya, Ghana and Egypt — markets where mobile money often stands in for a bank account and speed matters more than anything else.
“For customers, remittances are about reliability. If a transfer fails or is delayed, it has real consequences for families waiting on the other side. That’s why certainty matters as much as speed,” said Hesham Sherif, head of remittance at botim. “Our partnership with TerraPay strengthens our remittance infrastructure across the world, especially in key African corridors through real-time validation and broader payout coverage, improving success rates and delivery”.
Remittances into Africa hit an estimated $96.4 billion in 2024, about 5.2% of regional GDP, making basic plumbing — payout coverage, verification, settlement speed — more critical than feature sets. Missed transfers can mean missed rent or school fees. That pressure has pushed providers to prioritize reliability over bells and whistles.
The tie-up also opens botim’s UAE user base to TerraPay’s network, effectively turning the app into another on-ramp for cross-border flows.
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“Remittances are a critical financial lifeline for millions of families across the world, and reliability is non-negotiable,” said Bassem Awada, senior vice president at TerraPay. “Our partnership with botim money brings together TerraPay’s global payments infrastructure and real-time wallet validation with botim’s strong presence in the UAE, enabling faster, more secure cross-border transfers into the globe”.
The move deepens botim money’s shift from messaging into finance. The service sits inside the Botim ecosystem, owned by Astra Tech, which has been layering payments and financial tools on top of its communications base. For UAE fintechs chasing the country’s expatriate workforce, remittances remain the most direct path to scale, and the hardest to get wrong.
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Microsoft Plans $10 Billion-Plus Gulf Expansion Despite Iran Conflict
Security is shaping Microsoft’s approach, from resilience work with governments to what it will say about how the money splits by country.
Microsoft is planning more than $10 billion of investment across the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Kuwait through 2030, Vice Chair and President Brad Smith told Reuters, calling the spending schedule aggressive. The Iranian conflict that began on February 28 has not persuaded the company to scale back.
“We’re sustaining all the investments we planned to make before this conflict started, and we are in fact adding to them,” Smith said. The $10 billion-plus total does not, however, show how large those additions are.
The investment, which Smith described as part of Microsoft’s continued infrastructure expansion, is aimed at cloud and AI infrastructure and at the company’s growing regional operations. Microsoft also intends to put more than $400 million into subsea and terrestrial connectivity across the Middle East by 2030.
The spending fits the region’s own ambitions too. Gulf governments have been investing heavily in AI infrastructure as part of a push to diversify their economies beyond oil and gas and turn themselves into global technology hubs. Major cloud and AI providers have been drawn in part by the land and relatively low-cost energy on offer.
Microsoft is widening its partnerships with regional AI companies, though not on identical terms. In 2024, it invested $1.5 billion in Abu Dhabi-based G42 for a minority stake, and Smith currently sits on G42’s board. Saudi Arabia’s Humain and Qatar’s Qai are working with Microsoft on selected priority areas, but Smith said the company does not plan to make capital investments in either.
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The conflict has added another strand to Microsoft’s work in the region. Since it began, Smith said, the company has supported regional partners with digital resilience assessments, and it is now working with Gulf countries through a digital resilience initiative focused on preparedness and the protection of critical data.
So far, the company has given no country-by-country breakdown of the investment, citing security among other factors. So while the headline figure is public, how Microsoft divides the spending among the four countries is not.
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