EasyBank, a Tunis-based fintech founded in 2023, has raised $370,000 (1.2 million Tunisian dinars) from undisclosed investors to expand its AI-driven banking and lending services for underserved customers across the Middle East, North Africa and France.
The company builds digital banking and credit tools aimed at populations traditionally overlooked by legacy financial institutions — a large addressable group in Tunisia, where fewer than 40% of adults hold a formal bank account and credit card penetration sits around 8%. EasyBank's pitch is to use AI-based underwriting and a fully digital onboarding flow to serve exactly that gap, without the branch infrastructure traditional banks depend on.
Where the money is going
According to the company, the new funding will support expansion beyond Tunisia into other underserved markets across the MENA region, as well as into France — a natural extension given the size of the Tunisian diaspora there and the cross-border financial needs that come with it, from remittances to credit history that doesn't easily transfer between countries.
"We want to bridge the gap between traditional banking and the digital economy," said EasyBank CEO Mohamed Khelifi, describing the company's goal to "scale our operations and bring our solutions to new markets."
Part of a broader pattern
EasyBank's raise is modest by global fintech standards, but it fits a recognizable pattern in Tunisia's funding landscape: smaller, focused rounds aimed at financial inclusion rather than the larger growth-stage checks more common in Gulf markets. With mobile money penetration still in the single digits despite high smartphone adoption, AI-driven alternative credit and digital banking remain some of the more active corners of Tunisian fintech investment — alongside payments infrastructure and RegTech.
Whether EasyBank can translate a $370,000 seed-stage raise into the kind of MENA-and-France footprint its CEO describes will depend heavily on the same factors constraining the broader ecosystem: access to follow-on capital, and Tunisia's ability to make its foreign exchange and equity ownership rules workable for companies that need to grow beyond its borders.