If you run a shop, a small online store, or a service business in Lebanon, the way you collect money has become a real cost line. Two names dominate the conversation: Whish Money and OMT. Both are licensed payment players, both have huge networks, and both want to handle your customers' payments. The question merchants keep asking is simple: which one is cheaper to get paid through?
The honest answer is that they price very differently, and one of them is much more open about its numbers than the other.
What Whish Money charges merchants
Whish Money is a wallet-first company, licensed by Banque du Liban under Resolution No. 19/21/22 dated August 10, 2022. It publishes a full fee table on its website, which makes it easy to plan around.
For accepting payments, Whish runs a product called Whish Pay. The merchant cost is 1% for all websites except Shopify, and 2% on Shopify. Payments made by the customer through Whish Pay are free of charge for the customer, so the percentage is the merchant's cost, not the buyer's. Whish Pay integrates with Shopify, WordPress, and custom-built websites.
The other number that matters for a business is getting your money out. Cashing out from the Whish wallet, over the counter or at an ATM, costs 1%. So a merchant who collects through Whish Pay and then withdraws is effectively paying the acceptance fee plus the 1% cash-out, unless the balance is spent through the wallet or card instead.
A few limits are worth knowing. A Whish corporate account holds a maximum balance of USD 30,000, an individual account caps at USD 3,000, and an individual Visa card account at USD 10,000. Adding money via card or through a payment link costs 3%, which is relevant if you ever push funds into the wallet from outside.
How OMT handles business payments
OMT, the brand of Online Money Transfer S.A.L., comes at the merchant problem from the opposite direction. It is built on the country's largest physical agent network, with more than 1,400 locations, and it sits at the top of the BDL List of Electronic Payment Service Providers.
OMT's strength is cash. Through its "Cash to Business" service, a customer can walk into any OMT branch and pay a registered business, and the merchant gets confirmation through a reference number. For an online store, this means you can let a buyer pay in cash at an OMT point and release the order once the payment clears. That trust factor is why it is often used for higher-value or business-to-business orders where the buyer prefers cash over a card.
OMT also runs OMT Pay, a dual-currency wallet that holds both LBP and USD. Customers can pay at stores by scanning a QR code, send wallet-to-wallet transfers free of charge, and use an OMT Visa card. Wallet-to-wallet and adding money at an OMT location are free, which keeps customer-side friction low.
The catch on OMT pricing
Here is the key difference for a merchant doing the math. OMT publishes a clear price list for its local money transfer service, OMT Intra, where fees are flat amounts rather than percentages. As an example from the list valid starting November 1, 2025, sending USD 1 to USD 100 costs USD 1, and a local LBP transfer between LBP 10,000 and LBP 5,000,000 costs LBP 50,000.
What OMT does not publish on its website is a standard merchant acceptance rate for its Cash to Business service. That pricing is arranged directly with the business. So while Whish gives you a percentage you can budget against today, an OMT merchant deal has to be quoted. Any specific OMT merchant rate you may hear quoted should be treated as reported until OMT confirms it for your account.
So which one pays better
It depends on how your customers actually pay. If most of your sales are online and your buyers already use a wallet, Whish Pay at 1% on a custom site is cheap, predictable, and easy to plug in. The published rate is the deciding advantage, because you can model your margins without a sales call.
If your customers prefer paying in cash, or you sell bigger-ticket items where buyers want the comfort of handing money to a branded counter, OMT's 1,400-plus locations and its Cash to Business flow are hard to beat. The trade-off is that you will need to contact OMT to find out what that service costs for your business.
The practical move for most merchants is to price out both against your real sales mix. Pull a month of orders, split them into card or wallet versus cash, and ask OMT for a written quote so you are comparing two real numbers, not one number against a question mark.
Whish Money
OMT
