Cairo, Egypt — EFG Hermes, the investment banking arm of Egyptian financial group EFG Holding, has launched Younit, a service it calls Egypt’s first retail algorithmic trading API platform, giving individual investors, coders and students access to its trading systems via the EFG Hermes ONE app.
The company describes Younit as an open layer that sits on top of its trading infrastructure. Through it, users can automate their strategies, try out investment ideas, see their portfolios visually, build their own trading applications and enter algorithmic trading contests judged on performance.
At the core of the offer are the bank’s trading application programming interface (API) and its software development kit (SDK), which EFG Hermes is now opening to a wider pool of market participants. Individuals and developers can therefore build directly on top of the broker’s systems. EFG Hermes said the launch is a major step in bringing automated, app-based and what it called intelligent trading to more people, both at home and across the region.
Ahmed Waly, Group Head of Securities Brokerage at EFG Hermes, said: “Younit represents a new chapter for retail trading in Egypt and MENA,” and added: “For years, advanced trading infrastructure was largely limited to institutional participants. With Younit, we are opening access to the building blocks of smarter trading, automation, market data, APIs, SDKs, and analytics so traders and builders can move from reactive decision-making to more disciplined, data-driven market participation. This is not just a product launch; it is the creation of a new participation layer for the market.”
Younit runs on a single infrastructure base meant to serve several groups of users, and Egypt is the first market. Retail traders can set rule-based strategies to run automatically, test ideas against historical data before committing money, and use conditional execution tools that the company says bring more discipline and efficiency to their trading.
Developers get the tools to write trading strategies and to build analytics dashboards, portfolio visualization tools, basket-trading products and other analytical apps aimed at the market. Students and young university talent, meanwhile, can turn academic projects into working market tools, take part in real-world challenges and, according to EFG Hermes, raise their chances of landing internships and jobs.
The new platform will also add capabilities to EFG Hermes ONE, the broker’s existing retail app, with richer analytics, smarter tools and more advanced trading functions. When EFG Hermes relaunched ONE in August 2024, it said the app offered what it called the Egyptian market’s pioneering licensed e-KYC digital onboarding, operated in Egypt and Kuwait, and gave users access to 35 global markets through its Bahrain-based affiliate OLT Investment International Company.
EFG Hermes also linked Younit to the Egyptian Exchange’s (EGX) continuing push to modernize the country’s capital market and widen participation through technology. The company said that putting market data, automation tools and practical testing environments in the hands of retail investors, developers and students is meant to encourage better-informed, more disciplined trading in listed shares, add to the innovation scene around the EGX, and support market access, depth and retail participation over time.
The bank is also building Younit into a community for algorithmic trading. Its plans for the platform include hackathons, competitions and challenges for universities, along with summer internship programs and leaderboards that rank performance.
Rana El Sharqawy, Corporate Data Science and Analytics Head, said: “Younit turns algorithmic trading from a theoretical concept into a practical, measurable, and collaborative experience,” and added: “By giving participants access to data, benchmarks, APIs, and community challenges, we are creating an environment where ideas can be tested, improved, and transformed into real trading solutions. Our goal is to help build a regional community of traders, students, and developers who can use data science and automation to shape the future of market participation.”
According to EFG Hermes, the main aim is to make its trading infrastructure easier to reach without giving up the trust, reliability and institutional standing tied to its name. The company said Younit is built for serious use: developers get the technical base they need, while traders gain more control, insight and structure in how they approach the market.
Ahmed Raslan, Data Science Lead, said: “Younit is an invitation to build. We are putting real market infrastructure into the hands of Egypt’s developers, students, and innovators, and we are building this community hand in hand with them. We cannot wait to see what Egyptian talent will create”.
The retail launch follows work on the institutional side. In May 2025, EFG Hermes teamed up with Horizon Trading Solutions to give its buy-side brokerage clients execution algorithms such as VWAP (Volume Weighted Average Price), TWAP (Time Weighted Average Price), Percent of Volume and Implementation Shortfall across all Gulf Cooperation Council markets and Egypt, with the rollout set to start in the second half of 2025.
Younit could narrow some of the gap between those institutional tools and what individual investors can use on the EGX.
Waly added: “At EFG Hermes, we are committed to remaining at the forefront of market innovation by giving our clients powerful, accessible tools that help them engage with markets more effectively,” and went on: “By making advanced trading infrastructure more widely available, we believe Younit can help support greater market participation and, over time, contribute to deeper retail trading activity and broader capital market development. This is how we build the market forward by giving participants the tools to build, test, and trade with greater insight.”
EFG Holding is listed on both the EGX and the London Stock Exchange and operates in Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain and Jordan. Alongside EFG Hermes, the group runs non-bank finance arm EFG Finance, which includes fintech company Valu, and commercial lender Bank NXT.
