This partnership brings hyper-personalised, real-time experiences to millions of users
By ; Islam Tawfik
eNovate, a subsidiary of eFinance Investment Group, and Cobi, a UAE-headquartered AI-native customer intelligence platform, today announced the integration of Cobi’s AI-powered intelligence infrastructure across its digital payment ecosystem to redefine how young people across Egypt engage with digital financial services.
Enabled through Mastercard’s Engage programme, the partnership combines eNovate’s digital payments product suite and Cobi’s AI-powered engagement platform to give financial institutions a new level of intelligence, personalisation, and behavioural insight across their customer base. As the MENA region emerged as a global hub for financial services innovation in 2025, fuelled by government initiatives and rapid digital payments growth, the focus is shifting toward AI-powered engagement and intelligence at scale.
The collaboration begins with the Rize app, eNovate’s flagship digital wallet, where Cobi’s intelligence layer will power real-time personalisation for Egypt’s youth segment. With 85% of people across MENA already using at least one emerging payment method, this allows banks and fintechs to better understand spending behaviours, identify friction, and deliver timely product interventions that drive activation, loyalty, and long-term customer value. The capability will extend across eNovate’s broader digital payment services, forming Egypt’s first large-scale AI-driven portfolio management infrastructure.
With the MENA region’s AI in financial services market projected to reach $4.7 billion by 2032, underscoring the scale of opportunity for intelligent, data-driven payment infrastructure across the region. At the core of the partnership is Cobi’s behavioural AI engine, which builds deep context on how users engage, identifies patterns, and recommends or triggers next-best-actions across acquisition, activation, and retention journeys for customers combining it with eNovate’s role as a central payments and digital services provider to Egypt’s banks, telcos, fintechs, merchants, and government-linked entities, the collaboration marks a major step toward intelligent, personalised financial experiences across the country.
Nashwa Kamel, CEO of eNovate, explained: “eNovate is committed to enabling banks & financial institutions with modern, data-driven capabilities. Partnering with Cobi allows us to introduce real-time intelligence into every digital wallet and payment experience we support, starting with the youth-focused Rize app. This collaboration strengthens our mission to provide Egypt with the most advanced and responsive payment infrastructure that provides insights into spend behaviour, helping banks & financial institutions to spot inefficiencies, optimize costs, and make smarter, data-driven decisions. By turning raw spend data into strategic intelligence, which empowers businesses to anticipate trends, strengthen supplier relationships, and accelerate sustainable growth.
Darren Edmund, CEO of Cobi, highlighted: “Our partnership with eNovate represents a fundamental shift in how digital payment infrastructure operates. By embedding Cobi as the intelligence layer across eNovate’s ecosystem, we are enabling banks and financial platforms to move beyond static transaction processing toward real-time, adaptive systems that understand and respond to user behaviour instantly. This allows institutions to personalise at scale, optimise portfolio performance, and build deeper, longer-lasting customer relationships. We’re glad to have had Mastercard’s Engage programme support this collaboration.”
Looking ahead, the partnership will extend toward agentic payment experiences, where AI not only analyses user behaviour but autonomously recommends or initiates actions that improve financial outcomes, ushering in a new era of intelligent and proactive financial services across Egypt. The initial deployment begins in Q1 2026, with expansion planned across additional eNovate-powered platforms and regional markets.
