Developing a reliable financial distress prediction model has been a long-standing research area. Recently, machine learning algorithms have been increasingly popular in the area. In this paper, a hybrid approach of Genetic Algorithm (GA) and Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) for Financial Distress Prediction (FDP) (FDP-GAMLP) is proposed. FDP-GAMLP emphasizes on GA-based tuning of the four major hyper-parameters, namely network width, network depth, network optimizer, and dense layer activation function, which can influence on whether the algorithm explodes or converges. An improved GA is utilized to optimize the MLP model's hyper-parameters for better prediction. The prediction performance is evaluated using real data set with samples of companies from countries in Middle East region. The resampling technique using k-fold evaluation metrics is adopted to get unbiased and most accurate results. The simulation results show that FDP-GAMLP outperforms the classical machine learning models in terms of predictive accuracy.