Egypt Gives Initial Sandbox Approval to NFC Passport Checks for Foreign Investors

EFG Holding has received initial approval from Egypt’s Financial Regulatory Authority to enter the regulator’s sandbox with a platform that verifies foreign nationals by reading the chip in an NFC-enabled electronic passport, letting them open investment accounts without appearing in person.

The platform was built with VLens and will be offered through EFG Hermes ONE, the group’s digital trading service. The approval is preliminary. The project sits in the sandbox’s pre-testing queue and is not yet live.

It is the second NFC electronic passport verification project to reach preliminary approval there. Lumin Soft, which joined the sandbox last March, obtained approval for live testing of the same concept last month.

The sandbox itself is a year old. Launched under then-chairman Mohamed Farid, it has taken more than 50 project applications, granted preliminary approval to nine and moved two into live testing.

Reading an electronic passport over NFC pulls the data directly from the chip rather than photographing the document and inspecting the image. The companies describe the result as remote digital identity verification that still supports regulatory compliance requirements, and say it will cut the paperwork for non-Egyptian investors seeking access to Egyptian investment services.

Ahmed Khalifa, executive director of the authority’s sandbox and its chief data officer, called the project a practical example of using digital transformation to develop financial services. It would let non-Egyptians reach investment services across asset classes in the Egyptian market, he said, and improve the competitiveness of the non-banking financial sector.

“Receiving the FRA’s initial approval marks an important step in advancing digital access to Egypt’s capital markets,” said Dina Anwar, co-head of the digital retail trading platform at EFG Hermes, who described the integration of the VLens verification tool into EFG Hermes ONE as a way of making onboarding more secure for foreign investors.

VLens chief executive Mohamed Mamdouh traced the work back to the authority’s Decree 140 in 2023. He said the company has validated 4.3 million unique Egyptian identities and sent more than 550,000 electronically signed contracts to the authority’s central repository.

Identity rules elsewhere in the Egyptian system have been moving at the same time. The central bank set out rules for a digital financial identity platform in August, and the telecoms regulator opened biometric verification for remote telecom services over objections from rights groups.

Sources: TechAfrica News, EnterpriseAM

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By the ID Tech Editorial Team