AUC students excel at the Central Bank of Egypt’s FinYology Competition

The top teams from the Spring 2021 Entrepreneurship and Innovation ENTR4102 class were invited to present their projects to the Central Bank of Egypt and Banque Misr for the FinYology Competition. This offered an opportunity for students to interact with and present their financial technology ideas to top banking executives.

The fintech (financial technology) industry has been growing substantially in Egypt and as part of The American University in Cairo's (AUC) commitment to developing talent and raising awareness among youth, the AUC School of Business and the Central Bank of Egypt (CBE) collaborated to raise fintech ideas among AUC students through the Entrepreneurship and Innovation class.

The Entrepreneurship and Innovation (ENTR4102) class has been offered for 10 years. The course recently became a major requirement where undergraduate students learn about the process of creating a startup, in addition to learning about the entrepreneurial ecosystem at large.

For the past year, Associate Professor Ayman Ismail, Abdul Latif Jameel Endowed Chair of Entrepreneurship, and the founding director of the AUC Venture Lab has been working with CBE on providing an experiential learning component as part of the course.

CBE’s recently launched initiative “FinYology” is offered to engage the youth and expand their understanding of finance and fintech. Class students come up with their own startup ideas and are encouraged to focus their projects in the fintech space. They then develop the concept and business model for their ideas and learn from different mentors including professionals from CBE. The top teams from the final project presentation get to present to the central bank and Banque Misr executives. Banque Misr offers the top students internships in their new digital bank project.

Ismail expressed his excitement about the students' participation in this initiative.“Fintech is among the fastest growing and most impactful sectors in Egypt, and we want our graduates to lead this transformative sector. By partnering with the Central Bank of Egypt (CBE), our top students get to pitch their Fintech startup ideas to CBE and Banque Misr executives and get exposure to real-world problems and cutting edge knowledge,” Ismail said.

The projects presented covered different aspects of the fintech industry. The following projects were presented by the student teams: PoD, Aqarna, and EBIC. The first team to present was PoD (short for “Payment on Delivery”), which is a service that allows customers to pay with their credit card on delivery. This service aims at solving the problem of skepticism of Egyptian customers of inserting their credit card information online at the fear of fraud.

Aqarna is a service that sells real estate fractions at the unit pro-rata according to investor contribution using authenticated preliminary sales contracts. This service aims to make small investments easier and more approachable.

EBIC helps medium farm owners generate profit through livestock and crops through investment channels.

In the final jury session of the competition, PoD and Aqarna teams were both announced as the winners, and internships were offered to the top teams at Banque Misr's new "digital bank".

Congratulations to our phenomenal students! Keep #MakingAUCProud!

To read more about the competition, click here