Chari, the Moroccan B2B commerce and fintech company, has appointed Aurélien Pichon, formerly Visa’s Global Head of Client Operations and Services, to its board as an independent director.
Pichon led a worldwide organisation of close to 5,000 people at Visa before stepping down. He was elevated to that role in 2024 after heading operations and client services for Visa’s Central Europe, Middle East and Africa region, the same region where Chari operates. He is based in the Middle East and previously worked at Thomson Reuters and Google earlier in his career.
His appointment comes as Chari pushes beyond its original retailer-distribution business into regulated financial infrastructure and fintech infrastructure-as-a-service.
“We did not look for a name. We looked for someone who has personally run payments operations at a scale we intend to reach and who understands both the institutional side and the merchant side of this business,” said Ismael Belkhayat, CEO and co-founder of Chari
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The board appointment builds on a fintech push that has been underway for more than a year. Chari holds a payment institution licence from Morocco’s central bank, Bank Al-Maghrib. It has been developing a super app to let small shopkeepers manage payments, access credit, and handle customer transactions. This is part of a broader plan to turn the country’s informal retail network into financial access points for underbanked communities.
That push has also been backed with fresh capital. Chari closed a $12 million Series A round in October 2025, led by SPE Capital and Orange Ventures with participation from Verod-Kepple, Plug and Play, Global Founders Capital, Endeavor Catalyst, and other regional funds.
The following month, Cairo-based DisrupTech Ventures joined as an investor, its first investment in Morocco and only its second in Africa outside Egypt, bringing total funding to around $17 million and making Chari one of Morocco’s most well-funded startups.
Founded in 2020 by husband-and-wife team Ismael Belkhayat and Sophia Alj, Chari has onboarded more than 20,000 small retailers across Morocco, Tunisia, and Côte d’Ivoire.
Last updated: September 23, 2026
