Paymee: Profile of a Tunisian Payment Pioneer Under Pressure

Paymee was one of the first Tunisian startups to offer merchants an online payment gateway. Its story is also a warning: in 2023 a money laundering suspicion report froze its funds and those of its founder, in a case that turned on how Tunisia regulated, or failed to regulate, payment facilitators. This profile covers the company, its products and the dispute.

Paymee at a glance

• Founder and CEO: Marwen Amamou, a Tunisian computer engineer who studied at ISI Ariana and worked in France before returning to Tunis.
• Founded: sources differ. We Are Tech Africa gives 2017; Wamda gives 2018; a 2018 profile in Tunisian Monitor says the company was started in Paris in March 2018.
• Startup Label: granted in May 2019 under Tunisia's Startup Act.
• Funding: a six-figure round led by P1 Ventures in July 2022, amount undisclosed. Paymee had earlier won the grand prize of the second season of the El Pitch competition.
• Recognition: a fintech innovation prize from the Presidency of the Government at the November 2022 Francophonie summit in Tunisia, according to the company.

Products

Paymee began in 2018 as a mobile app for paying merchants and sending money, with a gateway for e-commerce sites. It then focused on businesses:

• Payment gateway: acceptance of Tunisian and international bank cards and La Poste's e-Dinar cards, through plugins or an API. Payments run through the secure platform of the Société Monétique Tunisie (SMT).
• Paylink: payment links for businesses without a website, for invoices, phone or social media orders and deposits.
• QR code payments: a fixed QR code with an adjustable amount, presented in 2022 as a replacement for card terminals.
• Paymee On Delivery: couriers generate a QR code for each parcel; the customer scans it and pays by card at the door. Aramex was cited as a logistics client in 2022.

In mid-2022 Paymee said it had more than 250 business accounts and over 100,000 completed transactions. These products target the core weakness of Tunisian e-commerce, the dominance of cash on delivery, covered in our guide to e-commerce payments in Tunisia.

The 2023 freeze

According to Paymee's February 2024 press release and reporting by Webdo:

• 24 February 2023: the Commission Tunisienne des Analyses Financières (CTAF), Tunisia's financial intelligence unit, received a suspicious activity report from an unknown source. It accused Paymee of operating as a payment institution without a licence and of money laundering.
• Paymee's funds and the personal funds of its legal representative were frozen, and a criminal case was opened.
• October 2023: a Banque Centrale de Tunisie (BCT) inspection report concluded that Paymee was not acting as a payment institution but as a payment facilitator, a category the company said was not yet fully regulated.
• January 2024: the BCT published guidelines on payment facilitation, requiring facilitators to operate in partnership with a licensed bank or institution.
• February 2024: the case was still open after 11 months. Paymee said over 750 clients were affected, that it had processed about 90 million dinars, that its operations were paralysed and that it faced an imminent risk of closing.

These are the company's account and press reports; we have not seen the authorities' files.

What happened next

The public record after early 2024 is thin. Paymee announced an innovative-project label in Algeria in March 2024. Its website remains online, but its blog shows no update on the case after February 2024. Merchant guides to Tunisian payment providers published in 2025 and 2026 still described Paymee's accounts as frozen or the company as facing serious regulatory difficulties. We found no official announcement that the case was closed or the funds released. Readers should treat Paymee's current status as unconfirmed.

Lessons for Tunisian fintechs

The Paymee case illustrates the regulatory risk in Tunisian payments. Some lessons are practical:

• Know your category. The line between a payment facilitator and an unlicensed payment institution decides whether you are innovating or committing an offence. Our explainer on payment institutions in Tunisia sets out the categories.
• Document flows of funds. Facilitators that touch merchant money are exposed to anti-money laundering scrutiny. See our article on AML and e-KYC rules.
• Plan for frozen accounts. A freeze stops payouts to merchants immediately, and those merchants bear the damage too.

The BCT's January 2024 guidelines, which Paymee says it helped inform, gave the facilitator model a clearer basis. Konnect and Flouci both now describe themselves as BCT-authorised facilitators. Paymee's experience shows the cost of operating before the rules existed.