Bassel Sabri: So by the end of September, Egypt’s instant payment network had processed almost 2.5 billion transactions worth around 7 trillion pounds, and that’s according to the central bank. More of the economy now runs through a few digital pipes. But as you can remember, last year a fire at the Ramses Telecom exchange led the Egyptian Exchange to suspend a full day, or a full trading session. So who carries that risk, and are investors pricing it in?
Joining us right now is Eng. Romany Rizkalla, chairman of the Afro Asian Commerce Chamber and the AAPSO AI and Governance Federation. Thank you very much for joining us, Engineer Romany.
Eng. Romany Rizkalla: It’s my pleasure.
Bassel Sabri: So first of all, after the Ramses fire, you argued it exposed how centralized Egypt’s digital network is. Now, 16 months on, has anything changed, or would the same fire today do the same damage?
Eng. Romany Rizkalla: You know, some progress has been made on redundancy at the margins, but structurally the core remains largely unchanged. While operators have patched individual connection points, Egypt’s digital architecture is still heavily bottlenecked through key physical hubs. A similar major incident at a critical nexus today would still trigger widespread cascading failure, because decentralizing requires massive capital expenditure and deep infrastructure redesign that may take years, not months. It’s like this.
Bassel Sabri: Now, the government said that the exchange itself had no technical failure, but we saw that trading stopped because brokers could not connect. Now the question is, should independent backup connectivity be a condition of a brokerage license? Actually,
Eng. Romany Rizkalla: you know, absolutely, yes. It is a fallacy to separate the exchange’s health from brokers’ ability to reach it. If the market is closed, the system has failed. Independent multipath backup connectivity, using alternative fiber routes or [unclear: “satellite flavors”], should be absolutely non-negotiable for maintaining a brokerage license in financial markets. Single points of failure at the broker level are really systemic risks.
Bassel Sabri: Now, the question that is lingering is the consequences of such an incident. Let’s talk about InstaPay, for instance, that now carries trillions of pounds, and there have been already several reported interruptions this year as it becomes the default way Egyptians pay. Is the payment system becoming too concentrated to fail?
Eng. Romany Rizkalla: You know, now InstaPay is rapidly approaching too big to fail. When a national payment rail becomes a critical public utility carrying trillions, interruptions are no longer just technical glitches. They are macroeconomic stress events. You know, the solution isn’t to slow its growth, but to mandate extreme architectural resilience: load balancing across multiple independent nodes, and stress testing, so that the central switch has instantaneous and seamless hot standby redundancy.
Bassel Sabri: So you just actually said the solution. Are you seeing any indication that such a system is being adopted?
Eng. Romany Rizkalla: You know, it’s adopted somehow. But I think the financial inclusion in Egypt is brand new, so you need more development. You need more updating. You need more cybersecurity. And this is very important, in my point of view, because it’s the real crisis we face worldwide now, if we deal with payments, if we deal with issues like this. So you must care about how to secure this system, this online system. It’s very, very important.
Bassel Sabri: Right. Going back to the incident, Telecom Egypt said its damaged assets were insured, but insurance, of course, covers the buildings, not the business lost across the economy. So who should pay for this? The operators, banks, or finally the customer?
Eng. Romany Rizkalla: It must be a shared cost, but driven by regulator mandate. Operators and banks profit directly from digital transactions, so they must invest heavily in infrastructure resilience as a cost of doing business, not an afterthought. However, because systemic stability is a public good, regulators should provide tax incentives or tariff structures that make building redundancy commercially viable, ensuring the customer isn’t left footing the bill for corporate underinvestment.
Bassel Sabri: Now, Engineer Romany, every day we speak to fintech founders and companies and startups who rely heavily on the internet. So for listed payments and fintech companies, downtime is lost revenue by the minute. When you read their disclosures, what signals a real continuity plan, and what is just boilerplate?
Eng. Romany Rizkalla: Boilerplate language regularly talks about industry standards, backups, disaster recovery policies and insurance coverage. Real signals include concrete metrics: [unclear: “The disclosing abbreviation I will give you abbreviation and I will say the provision as the meaning in order for the audience”] RPO, recovery point objective, and RTO, recovery time objective, targeted down to minutes; [unclear: “reporting resulting of life and announcing failure”]; stress tests; and detailing geographic multi-region redundancy, where operations can switch data centers automatically without manual human intervention.
Bassel Sabri: Engineer Romany, it’s been a great pleasure having you with us, and we definitely look forward to having you again once more on FINTECH.TV. Thank you.
