Cyrine Sanchou, Independent Strategy Advisor and newly appointed Co-Chair of the MENA Fintech Association’s Africa Chapter, joins FinTech TV’s Raghda Ibraheem on Wall Street to MENA to reframe how the region talks about African fintech.

Her starting point is not technology adoption curves or market sizing. It is small merchants needing to get paid, families receiving money from abroad, and entrepreneurs who have never had access to credit, needs fundamental enough that innovation has often moved faster than the finance infrastructure meant to serve them.

Cyrine draws a sharp line between the Gulf and Africa as starting points. The Gulf is a mature market, where fintech means doing more, more seamlessly. Africa means rethinking the model entirely, where constraints have fostered the kind of innovation that let mobile money leapfrog traditional banking outright. A board member at a leading Tunisian bank herself, she rejects the framing of banks versus fintechs, arguing that partnership, combining bank balance sheet and trust with fintech speed and customer-centric design, is a growth strategy rather than a defensive one.

Asked to name Africa’s next fintech breakout market, her answer is Tunisia: not the continent’s largest fintech market today, but one with strong engineering talent, a sophisticated banking sector, proximity to Europe, and commercial ties across both Africa and the Middle East.

Topics discussed: African fintech and financial inclusion, Gulf versus Africa market starting points, mobile money and leapfrogging, banks versus fintechs, Tunisia’s fintech potential, MFTA’s Africa Chapter.

Guest: Cyrine Sanchou, Independent Strategy Advisor; Co-Chair, Africa Chapter, MENA Fintech Association
Interviewer: Raghda Ibraheem, FinTech TV, Wall Street to MENA