With one million displaced people, Lebanon is turning to digital wallets to get aid

Since March, The Israeli attacks on Beirut and the occupation of southern Lebanon led to the displacement of more than one million people. Families are sheltering with relatives, renting if they can, or sleeping in cars and outdoors, putting enormous pressure on already fragile infrastructure. More than 130,000 people have crossed into Syria, many of them in dire need of food, cash assistance and shelter, according to a report issued by the International Organization for Migration.

As humanitarian needs increase, so does the flow of money from abroad. However, much of this support is not transmitted through traditional aid channels. Instead, they are routed via digital fintech platforms to trusted individuals on the ground, who purchase necessary items or distribute money directly to displaced people.

There is no real-time dataset that specifically captures war-related donations. However, remittances – the closest available proxy – provide context. Lebanon receives approximately $6 to $7 billion annually from abroad, equivalent to about a third of its gross domestic product, according to the United Nations Development Program in 2023.

The United Nations Development Program reported that remittance costs there averaged 11 percent, higher than the global average. In times of crisis, these flows are often diverted towards emergency support. What’s different now is how that money moves: increasingly, it’s sent instantly, peer-to-peer, through digital wallets.

“These informal flows are recorded through official Bank of Lebanon numbers and constitute about 70 percent of inflows during the crisis,” the UNDP added, noting that the money is often sent in cash with people traveling to the country.

From gift cards to financial infrastructure

Being Lebanese, my social media pages were filled with former colleagues and friends who set up their channels to receive donations, share photos of receipts, and show where the money was going.

A grassroots campaign run by Lebanese lawyer Jad Al-Asili raised $65,125 in 10 days, solely through social media and digital transfers. When asked which platforms were most impactful, he and other fundraisers pointed to Whish Money, though several others were used, including Paypal, Zelle and Venmo.

Originally launched to digitize gift cards, the company has evolved into a broad financial platform offering remittances, peer-to-peer transfers and payment services with over 2 million users in 110 countries. “We started from the fact that we wanted to disrupt gift card distribution,” says Tawfik Koussa, co-founder and CEO of Whish Money, describing how the company built an early wallet system in 2007 that allowed retailers to issue digital cards on demand. Over time, that infrastructure expanded into an entire financial ecosystem.

When banks stop working

The company’s primary focus was the unbanked and underbanked — those with limited or unreliable access to traditional banking services. These groups became central during Lebanon’s financial collapse. Globally, 1.4 billion people remain unbanked; The World Bank notes that access to affordable financial services is “critical to poverty reduction and economic growth.”

In Lebanon, with banks freezing deposits and restricting withdrawals, platforms like Whish Money have filled a critical gap, enabling people to move and access money outside the traditional system.

This infrastructure now shapes how aid moves in crises. Funds from family, diaspora or grassroots campaigns arrive directly in the digital wallet and can be spent instantly. At Whish Money, peer-to-peer transfers are the most popular, followed by international transfers. Koussa also points out that Whish Money is uniquely linked to US banking infrastructure, allowing users to link accounts abroad directly to wallets in Lebanon.

Displacement changes how people use these platforms. Overall growth is constant, but transaction patterns have changed. Families are making larger purchases and stocking up on essentials as uncertainty grows. Grocery bills that could have been as high as $200 are now rising as people prepare for the worst, Kosa says.