Founder Mythos
He Banked the Tuk-Tuk Drivers Everyone Called Criminals
I had general managers of banks calling me up and telling me, 'Mounir, you're going to lose a lot of money. These are all criminals.' But I find them to all be honest men.
In 2009 Nakhla started financing tuk-tuk operators no bank would touch. The exclusion was not a credit assessment. It was a prejudice, and he read it as an open market.
Where a whole category is written off by reputation rather than data, the founder who actually meets the customer finds a book of honest borrowers nobody else will serve.
Businesses with low levels of competition, low fixed costs, and an outsized positive impact on local communities.
From an eco-lodge in the Siwa oasis, Nakhla learned to hunt for markets everyone else ignored. He carried the same lens into rural microlending: unglamorous, uncontested, essential.
The most defensible position is the one no competitor wants. He built his moat out of the customers the banks were embarrassed to visit.
The growth possibilities with technology were just eye-opening.
First came Mashroey and then Tasaheel, one of Egypt's largest microfinance operations, built branch by branch in the countryside. Only after the lending worked did Nakhla wrap it in an app.
He did not start with the super-app and look for users. He started with proven rural demand and gave it software once he knew exactly what it needed.
On the plane on the way back I made the decision to found Halan.
Watching another platform scale through software, Nakhla saw how to reach millions of the same rural customers he had served one loan at a time. Halan now serves several million of them.
The insight was never the app. It was the underbanked rural customer he already understood. The technology only let him reach far more of them, far faster.