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Young Arabs Are Embracing The Fintech Revolution
Working hard and aiming for high-paying jobs no longer leads to financial security, let alone the ability to retire early.
Between government-sponsored pensions and cultural norms, older generations of Arabs living in the MENA region were never too concerned with how to invest and save money.
For them, simply working hard was enough to enjoy the financial stability necessary to focus on creating families and living well-rounded, fulfilling lives. Young Arabs on the other hand, appear to be living in a completely different world. One that is in many ways far more difficult than the world their parents grew up in.
Working hard and aiming for high-paying jobs no longer leads to financial security, let alone the ability to retire early.
“It’s not just about retiring; it’s about living better, having dreams, having time to breathe and reflect,” said Mayar Akrameh, 29-year-old management consultant, in an interview for AFP. “We’re taught that if you’re working and making enough money, even if you hate your job, you’re good. Or they think we’re good”.
To improve their financial outlook, increasingly many young Arabs are turning to various UAE-based finance platforms that educate users and simplify investing, making the daunting process more accessible.
The pandemic has accelerated the growth of the fintech industry in the MENA region even more. It’s estimated that 465 fintech firms in the UAE alone will generate about $2 billion in investment capital by 2022, up from $80 million raised in 2017.
Also Read: Dubai Establishes $272 Million Future District Fund To Attract Tech Companies
These new financial players fill the massive gap in the region’s investment landscape, which still focuses largely on high-net-worth individuals. “If someone wanted to invest $1,000 or $10,000, there was not much available” said Haitham Juma, an investment solutions manager at the UAE-based National Bank of Fujairah.
Hopefully, the blossoming fintech industry will give young Arabs the options they need to secure the stable and prosperous financial future they dream of.
News
G42’s Inception42 Wants AI To Show Its Work Before Investors Commit
Launched at SuperReturn Middle East, Alpha is pitched at sovereign wealth funds and private equity firms underwriting bigger deals on tighter timelines.
Inception42, G42’s agentic AI company, believes that institutional investors want AI they can check, not just AI that saves time. Its new tool, Alpha, launched at SuperReturn Middle East, is designed to draft investment memos in which every claim points back to its source.
Alpha is aimed at private equity firms, sovereign wealth funds and institutional allocators, which Inception42 says are underwriting larger, more complex positions under tighter timelines. Most AI tools, it argues, speed up individual tasks such as a memo draft or a comps table but leave the investment strategy scattered across files, inboxes and committee decks.
Teams upload Confidential Information Memoranda, diligence packs and portfolio data, which Alpha turns into insights grounded in that material. It checks how complete the diligence is, flagging gaps before they become late-stage surprises, then scores the deal against criteria the institution sets and drafts the memo.
Sourcing every claim is the core of Inception42’s Alpha pitch. Investment committees, the company says, have little time to challenge the evidence, and the audit trail is meant to give them more certainty. The company also promises institutions proof that their own strategy was applied consistently on every deal.
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“Every investment committee wants the same thing: the full picture of a deal and the confidence to act on it,” says Ashish Koshy, CEO of Inception42. “Alpha gives deal teams and committee members that picture, with every insight traceable to its source, so speed and rigor finally pull in the same direction”.
Alpha is available as SaaS, and investment data, Inception42 says, stays under the institution’s control at every step. Firms can tailor the tool with custom agents, and Alpha Skills will eventually add reusable, practitioner-designed workflows for tasks such as comparables analysis and credit assessment.
The company says Alpha is already proven in the region’s most significant financial institutions. If the tool works as described, committees get an investment memo they can interrogate rather than simply take on trust.
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