With One Million Displaced, Lebanon Turns to Digital Wallets for Aid

Since March, Israeli attacks on Beirut and the occupation of southern Lebanon have displaced over 1 million people. Families are sheltering with relatives, renting if they can, or sleeping in cars and out in the open, placing immense strain on already fragile infrastructure. Over 130,000 people have also crossed into Syria, many in urgent need of food, cash assistance, and shelter, according to a report by the International Organization for Migration.

As humanitarian needs surge, so does the flow of money from abroad. Yet much of this support is not moving through traditional aid channels. Instead, it is being routed through digital fintech platforms to trusted individuals on the ground, who buy necessary items or distribute funds directly to the displaced.

There is no real-time dataset capturing donations linked specifically to the war. However, remittances—the closest available proxy—offer context. Lebanon receives roughly $6 billion to $7 billion annually from abroad, equivalent to about a third of its GDP, according to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in 2023.

The UNDP reported that remittance costs there averaged 11 percent, higher than the global average. In times of crisis, these flows often shift towards emergency support. What is different now is how that money moves: Increasingly, it is being sent instantly, peer-to-peer, through digital wallets.

“These informal inflows are captured by the formal BDL figures and constitute around 70 percent of the inflows during the crisis,” the UNDP added, noting that money is also often sent as cash with people traveling to the country.

From Gift Cards to Financial Infrastructure

Being Lebanese myself, my social media feed has been inundated with former colleagues and friends setting up their channels to receive donations, sharing photos of receipts, and showing where money is going.

One grass-roots campaign run by Lebanese lawyer Jad Essayli raised $65,125 in 10 days, purely through social media and digital transfers. When asked which platforms have been the most impactful, he and other fundraisers pointed to Whish Money, though many other platforms, including Paypal, Zelle, and Venmo are also being used.

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 more than 2 million users across 110 countries. “We started off from the fact that we wanted to disrupt the distribution of gift cards,” says Toufic Koussa, cofounder and chairman 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 a full financial ecosystem.

When Banks Stop Working

The company’s core focus has been the unbanked and underbanked—those with limited or unreliable access to traditional banking. Those groups became central during Lebanon’s financial collapse. Globally, 1.4 billion people remain unbanked; the World Bank cites access to affordable financial services as being “critical for poverty reduction and economic growth."

In Lebanon, as banks froze deposits and restricted withdrawals, platforms like Whish Money filled a critical gap, enabling people to move and access money outside the traditional system.

That infrastructure now shapes how aid moves in crisis. Money from family, diaspora, or grass-roots campaigns lands straight in a digital wallet and can be spent immediately. On Whish Money, peer-to-peer transfers are the most popular, followed by international remittances. Koussa also notes that Whish Money is uniquely connected to US banking infrastructure, allowing users to link accounts abroad directly to wallets in Lebanon.

Displacement is changing how people use these platforms. Overall growth is steady, but transaction patterns have shifted. Families are making bigger purchases, stocking up on essentials as uncertainty grows. Grocery bills that might have been $200 are now climbing as people prepare for the worst, Koussa says.

There has also been a noticeable increase in money coming from abroad. “Yes, there is an increase,” he says, attributing it partly to Ramadan and Eid, but also to “people wanting to donate.”

Informal Networks

Much of this aid is organized informally. Influencers and grass-roots organizers act as intermediaries, collecting funds from abroad and distributing them locally. “We have seen an increase also because there are many influencers promoting themselves as the right people to actually donate to,” he says. This bottom-up system mirrors 2024, when Lebanon was also under attack by Israel. “It wasn’t the government, it wasn’t the donors, it was personal initiatives here and there that actually made people not starve to death.”

A January 2025 study by the Economic Research Forum found that trust in Lebanese public institutions has deteriorated, with the exception of the armed forces. “As for trust in the government, it is unambiguously lower in 2024 compared with 2013 and 2016,” the report noted. “A similar pattern is depicted for parliament, similarly with a significant decline since 2016.”

When asked whether these efforts are coordinated through fintech platforms like Whish Money, Koussa’s answer is unequivocal: “100 percent.”

Despite the urgency, these flows are not unregulated. “It does go through the monitoring process and the [anti-money laundering],” he stresses, noting that recipients are vetted and due diligence is conducted. The challenge is to balance speed and accessibility with the safeguards required in cross-border financial systems.

This shift is not without risk. In countries like the United Arab Emirates, fundraising without a license—even through social media—is a criminal offense. In Lebanon, digital donations operate in a far looser regulatory gray zone, shaped more by anti-money-laundering rules than a dedicated fundraising framework.

What Comes After Banks

At the core is trust. With faith in banks shattered, digital platforms are filling both a practical and psychological void. “I think nowadays it will boil down to trust. Trust is the new currency,” Koussa says.

For the more than 1 million people displaced inside Lebanon, this trust is not abstract. It determines whether money sent from abroad arrives safely, quickly, and in a form that can be used immediately to meet urgent needs

“We’re fighting a system that has ruled the world for the last 400 years,” he says. When asked whether he thinks they will win, he projects confidence. “Retail banking, the way we used to know it, I think it’s done. Banks will become pipelines; the real innovation in money and inclusion is happening in fintech.”

This story originally appeared on WIRED Middle East*.*