Attracting Capital to Fintech in Lebanon

According to the Pulse of Fintech H2’20, a bi-annual report on global fintech investment trends published by KPMG, overall global fintech funding across mergers and acquisitions (M&A), private equity (PE) and venture capital (VC) was $105 billion across 2,861 deals in 2020. The spending was reduced during the first half of the year but rebounded nicely in the second half, leading to the third largest investment period in Fintech ever. In Lebanon, however, the story was different. What was once the MENA region’s third most advanced fintech startup ecosystem, hosting 14 percent of the region’s fintech startups, and the fourth most served market by fintech companies, with 27 percent of MENA fintech startups serving the Lebanese market back in 2015 and 2016 as per the Fintech Sector in Lebanon 2018 Factbook by the Investment Development Authority of Lebanon (IDAL), has lost several competitive advantages. The banking failure and informal capital