21-year-old Egyptian-British founder positions 99 App as more than a fintech
United Kingdom, 29th May 2026 —99 App today announced that over 1,000 people have joined its waiting list for the United Kingdom’s first digital neobank built simultaneously for ethical and Sharia-aligned consumers. Abdalla Lotfy, the 21-year-old Egyptian-British founder, describes 99 App as more than a fintech. The product is a mobile-first current account with values alignment built into the core. It includes an integrated giving platform routed through registered UK charities and a screening engine that filters financial products against both ethical and Sharia criteria from a single database. The app also offers cashback and features tailored to every segment, from students to Gen Alpha.
“I did not originally set out to build a neobank. I started out reading philosophy,” said Lotfy, who entered King’s College London at 16 and is now finishing his Master’s at Imperial College Business School. “Reading philosophy forced me to look at the systems I had been raised in, instead of taking them for granted. The more I read across psychology, economics, and the existential writers, the more I understood that a great deal of what is accepted as ordinary is the result of choices that benefit a small number of people at the cost of everyone else. With 99 App, we want to give customers a real alternative.”
99 App gives customers control over where their deposits are deployed. Rather than dictating what counts as a good investment, the app screens products against the values its customers already hold and lets them decide for themselves. 99 App recognizes that the ethical consumer and the Sharia-aligned consumer often want the same outcome for different reasons, and that the technology now exists to serve both audiences in the same product.
Britain’s 31 million ethical and Sharia-aligned consumers finally have a serious challenger. The Arabic word “Sharia” translates literally as “the path to the watering place.” It is a system of principles for living, and in the context of finance, it provides a framework for matching capital to personal values. Ethical finance, drawn from a separate tradition rooted in cooperative and conscience-driven economics, reaches a similar set of conclusions through a different route. The two frameworks overlap so closely on what they screen out that 99 App applies a single engine to satisfy both audiences.
99 App has assembled an experienced management team. Its CCO/MLRO is a former Vice President at Barclays. Its CTO is the former CTO of Papel, where he runs a PCI-DSS Level 1 certified payments infrastructure with more than 50 engineers across Visa, Mastercard, and Troy schemes. Its Deputy CTO came from 15+ years of engineering at JPMorgan/barclays. Its advisor, Christophe Schwarz, was CTO of five fintechs and Managing Director at Barclays and UBS.
About 99 Financial Technologies Ltd
99 Financial Technologies Ltd is a London-headquartered fintech building the United Kingdom’s first digital neobank designed for ethical and Sharia-aligned consumers.
For more information, or to join 1000+ people on the waitlist, visit https://99app.co.uk
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Media Contact
Organization: 99 Financial Technologies Ltd
Contact Person: Abdalla Lotfy
Website: https://99app.co.uk
Email: Send Email
Country:United Kingdom
Release id:45496
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