Consumer finance in Egypt has changed considerably over the past decade, and few companies have shaped that change as directly as Valu.
Walid Hassouna has led the business since its inception in 2017, building it into the largest consumer finance platform in Egypt and one of the leading fintech companies in the region. As Chief Executive Officer, he holds full strategic and operational responsibility for Valu, overseeing its product vision, commercial growth, regulatory relationships, capital-markets presence and regional expansion.
Under his leadership, Valu has evolved from a single-product offering into a diversified financial-services ecosystem spanning consumer lending, SME finance and embedded fintech infrastructure. It now serves one million Egyptians across thousands of merchant touchpoints nationwide.
Financial inclusion has been central to that growth. Valu has expanded access to credit and financial services for segments of the Egyptian population that the traditional banking sector has historically underserved.
Hassouna brings 27 years of experience in banking and fintech to the role. Before joining EFG Holding in 2016, he built a 17-year banking career. He began at Misr International Bank, structuring and executing several award-winning project-finance and M&A transactions in Egypt and the GCC. As Head of Structured Finance and Syndication at Banque Misr, he took the bank to the top of the MENA league table for syndicated loans. He later served as General Manager and Head of Structured Finance and Investment Banking at Bank Audi, where he closed structured and project-finance transactions in excess of US$15 billion.
Across his career, he has managed and arranged more than US$25 billion of M&A, project finance, syndication and structured finance. Those transactions include the first mezzanine convertible in Egypt, the country's first balanced Shari'ah-compliant fund, its largest syndication (PEL I to VI), its biggest securitisation at EGP 16 billion and the first multi-layered Shari'ah-compliant project in Egypt's history.
At EFG Holding, he has also led the non-bank financial institutions platform for more than five years, a period in which it has grown multiple businesses and launched new brands.
His leadership philosophy rests on people rather than process. Hassouna has made a principle of hiring individuals who could one day be chief executives themselves, deliberately surrounding himself with talent that challenges rather than defers. The result is a leadership bench of independent thinkers across engineering, risk, product and capital markets, and an organisation able to move at the speed of a startup while meeting the governance standards of a publicly listed institution.
For Valu, that combination of banking discipline and technological ambition has become a defining strength. As more Egyptians move into formal, digital finance, Hassouna has positioned the company to serve the consumers and businesses that conventional lenders have struggled to reach.