News
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.
Also Read: Saudi Digital Payments Reach 80% As Cash Use Shrinks
“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.
News
Visa’s Return To Syria Starts With A Test And A Bank In Lebanon
Foreign visitors will be the first users to benefit, but whether Syria’s own banks and cardholders follow is still an open question.
Visa is returning to Syria. Its first live international card transaction in the country was a test rather than a launch, and the milestone event ran through a Lebanese bank.
The acquirer (the bank on the merchant’s side of a card payment) was Fransabank Lebanon, with Paymera as the other named partner. Nadim Moujaes, who heads a Fransabank Group subsidiary, describes the test as both the culmination of “longstanding efforts to link Syria back to international payment networks” and “the first step in a larger path”.
Syrian President Ahmed Al-Sharaa makes the first electronic payment in Syria using a @Visa card at a store in Damascus, following the lifting of US sanctions on Syria. pic.twitter.com/lpAN7nQ6Fc
— Tech Magazine (@TechMGZN) August 27, 2026
“We are excited to have successfully tested live transactions today as we plan to enable international visitors to use their Visa cards while in Syria,” says Leila Serhan, Visa’s senior vice president and group country manager for the North Africa, Levant and Pakistan region. Although a significant first step, that plan doesn’t come with a hard date for when a visitor’s card will work normally.
Mohammed Safwat Raslan, governor of the Central Bank of Syria, says the test paves the way for international card acceptance in Syria and that maintaining strong compliance, risk management and operational controls will remain essential. Serhan likewise stresses that Visa has worked within applicable legal, regulatory and compliance requirements. For a test transaction, it seems there was a great deal of attention paid to the rules, with the entire operation being carefully managed.
Also Read: Lebanon’s 5G Era Begins With 150 Stations And A $1M Budget
The test is the latest step in a sequence that began in December 2025, when Visa announced a strategic roadmap to support Syria’s integration into the global digital economy. In February 2026 it hosted its first industry gathering of banks, ecosystem partners and policymakers in Damascus and, the same month, signed an agreement with Syria’s Ministry of Communications and Information Technology in San Francisco.
Michel Kattouah, Paymera’s CEO, called the test “the return of international card acceptance,” but while that’s positive news, there’s no word yet on when a Syrian bank will issue a Visa card to a Syrian customer.
Visa’s Return To Syria Starts With A Test And A Bank In Lebanon
RØDE’s New DS3 Studio Arm Is Built For Heavier Creator Setups
Dubai Turns AI On Its Own Civil Service To Measure Productivity
Former Rockstar Director Dismisses GTA 6 Leaks As “Nothing Burger”
Qatar Airways Flies The World’s First Starlink-Equipped 787-9
Spotify Will Now Tell You If Your Favorite Artist Isn’t Real
Instagram Redraws Its Wordmark And The Internet Reads “Instagzam”
Anghami’s New Elite Program Starts With A Three-Decade Catalog
Qatar Is Getting Its First EV Plant, Built To Cope With Gulf Heat
Dubai’s aradus Wants AI To Run The Back Office Of Physical Trade
-
News3 weeks agoInstagram Redraws Its Wordmark And The Internet Reads “Instagzam”
-
News3 weeks agoAnghami’s New Elite Program Starts With A Three-Decade Catalog
-
News3 weeks agoQatar Is Getting Its First EV Plant, Built To Cope With Gulf Heat
-
News3 weeks agoDubai’s aradus Wants AI To Run The Back Office Of Physical Trade