EGYPT – Egypt-based mobile payments and loyalty platform Zeal Rewards has secured a six-figure seed investment from an angel investor to grow its team and scale its operations in the United Kingdom and Egypt.
Founded in 2019 by Omar Ebeid, Bellal Mohamed, and Amr Mohamed, Zeal enables users to link different payment methods (e.g., bank debit cards — with their Zeal accounts) and then make in-store payments by presenting the app’s QR code to a scanner at the store. The scanner is provided (to merchants) by Zeal.
The startup, incubated by UK-based SETsquared, aims to end fragmented in-store customer experiences including, long cashier queues and poor customer identification. Its QR technology enables merchants to collect better data regarding their customers and sales, and thus offer personalised rewards.
“With financial inclusion prioritised by the Central Bank of Egypt and a population of 100 million, Zeal is bringing Egyptians a seamless and rewarding mobile payments experience. We are targeting multi-sited food and beverage outlets, beauty salons and barbershops that are serving affluent and tech-savvy consumers,” said Omar Ebeid, founder of Zeal.
“With financial inclusion prioritised by the Central Bank of Egypt and a population of 100 million, Zeal is bringing Egyptians a seamless and rewarding mobile payments experience.”
Omar Ebeid – Founder, Zeal
Zeal’s payment experience is inspired by Apple Pay and allows users to connect a payment method to the Zeal app QR code and present it to a scanner in-store to pay and collect loyalty points in the same transaction.
“The Zeal team has definitely shown their eagerness to tackle a global fintech and customer retention problem that every B2C enterprise faces. We look forward to their continued growth,” said Caroline Fleming, centre director at SETsquared Surrey.
Every time, a user pays using Zeal at a specific outlet, they collect punches (or points) that they can then redeem for different rewards (from the same outlet). So, it is basically replacing loyalty cards with its digital solution that’s built on top of a payments product.
It also enables its partner businesses to receive payments from users by sending them payment links. Its partners include restaurants, cafes, beauty salons, and barbershops. The partners can access different types of reports and insights through Zeal’s dashboard for them — that also gives them the ability to forecast future customer spending using the existing data.
“The dashboard enables vendors to view actionable insights to trigger consumer behavior, engage with customers through targeted offers, push notifications and analyze customer data to increase their purchasing frequency and customer loyalty,” said the startup in a statement.
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