News

Sarwa Unveils New Branding While Ditching Robo-Advisory Skin

The company’s CEO explained that the new look represents “ambitious young achievers and forward-thinking builders” from the Sarwa community.

Published

3 years ago

August 24, 2023

Nour Nasir

Sarwa

UAE investing platform Sarwa has completed a makeover of its brand to better reflect the company’s vision and commitment to its centralized money-management tool. The reimagined brand represents a watershed moment for Sarwa as the company grows in confidence and acknowledges its success as the first one-stop shop for online investment and money management.

Mark Chahwan, co-founder and CEO of Sarwa, explained, “For the longest time, our community’s investing needs have been segregated into different platforms. One for passive investing, one for buying stocks, one for buying crypto, and one for a cash account that earns interest. The team has worked very hard to deliver on this vision of building an app where you have all the different ways of putting your money to work, all in one place. Our new identity reflects that perfectly while maintaining our core principles: simplicity, innovation, accessibility, and transparency”.

Also Read: SRMG Ventures Invests $5 Million To Boost Anghami’s Growth

The new Sarwa brand is based on the concept of an orbit — with the suite of tools represented as celestial objects around the gravitational center that is the Sarwa app.

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.

Published

6 days ago

August 27, 2026

Dana Saadeh

visa's return to syria starts with a test and a bank in lebanon

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.