Ep. 96: Amir Tabch - Tapping Into FinTech in the Middle East

Contact Amir Tabch: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amir-tabch/

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Mitch: (00:00)
 Welcome back to Count Me In, IMA's podcast about all things affecting the accounting and finance world. In this special new episode, my co-host Rouba dives into the world of FinTech in the Middle East region through an elaborate discussion with Amir Tabch. Amir has close to two decades of experience as a finance professional advisory board member for multinational companies in various FinTech and wealth tech initiatives. This conversation features the state of the sector in the region, and Amir explains how finance and accounting professionals can leverage these technologies to better support their organizations. Keep listening as we head over to their conversation now.

Rouba: (00:47)
I mean, you're someone who's acquired a successful career mainly because of your ability to read the trends and the patterns with passion. I mean, looking at the chart, I remember it, one of the stories was that whether it was your wife's contraction monitor or a financial chart, you have an eye for seeing the patterns behind the, when they manifest. So you pride yourself on looking past the complexity to see the certainty. How does one develop such an outlook, especially at a critical time, like now where God knows where the global economy is headed and trends are being accelerated or even annihilated , in some cases overnight?

Amir: (01:26)
Well, as much as I'd like to claim that identifying trends and patterns and forecasting is an inherent skill, it really isn't. Of course, on the other hand the creation is. Now there are essentially a lot of things that can take credit for being responsible when it comes to analyzing these prices and trends and patterns either when one's inspecting them in isolation or in totality. So, first of all, when it comes to looking at trends and patterns, it goes without saying that these analytical skills need to be honed. So one has to be in touch with market realities. We have to also look at human behavior industry changes, social and economic forces, and no amount of experience in the industry can make up for constant and consistent research. To be ever updated and in touch, not just with the events they can place in our industry, but all other events, whether it's culture, whether it's fashion. And the point I mentioned earlier, which is inclination. So being inquisitive by nature allowed me to always look beyond the final results and really go into these matters of causation behind those results. That being said, all who believed that being a man of numbers, someone like me, boring is not really accurate,  To be able to analyze these trends and immediately place the ones that are not in tandem with the market environment, which requires an extremely creative bent of mind. You have to be able to think outside the box when predicting matters of extreme relevance. And one also needs to be very well versed with consumer behavior and producer behavior trends that are a consequence of human psychology. And you have to have an approachable and inclusive outlook to things which allows you more room to acknowledge the possible mistakes and even benefit in detecting trends that would otherwise go unnoticed. And like you said, in such uncertain times, the only thing we can be certain of is the constant, unpredictable nature of things. And that's when we look at these trends and these patterns and these price formations, we can only doing so by living in the moment. And that is something I learned from, from Master Oogway in Kung Fu Panda, one of my son's favorite movies. He said, yesterday's history, tomorrow's a mystery, but today is a gift. That's why it's called the present. So Master Oogway a fantastic follower and really good at pattern. So basically living in the moment.

Rouba: (04:23)
If we were to look at this particular area, which is your area of expertise and, you know, something that's been on an evolutionary scale for the past three decades, we see most of   e-trading online banking and wealth tech driving it, but there's a recent report by KPMG that stated that over $135 billion were invested in FinTech last year globally. And, that the transactional transaction value is expected to grow to some $10 trillion in 2023. The Middle East financial services revenue will account for 8% of these figures. So experts find that this growth is directly related to the increasing number of FinTech, startups, growth of the Islamic banking sector and the high mobile penetration, which is above the entire planet. I mean the UAE loan has 173% So the UAE also accounts for one third of the total number of FinTech startups. We talk about 46% in the world, but in your opinion, what is really driving such an exponential growth?

Amir: (05:29)
Well, the underlying cause behind such results is the foundation really to building Syntech development, by the UAE policy makers. They began to implement these forward thinking policies, regarding the FinTech since 2017. Two leading, financial free zones, I've actually development and some tech space global markets on one hand and the IFC Dubai International Financial Center. Now the IFC created the FinTech hive, which was essentially a a hundred million dollar fund that gave companies access to accelerate a program mentorship from leading financial institutions and insurance partners. And in 2018 IFC I see an Accenture, which is a firm I'm sure everyone knows about, but to those that don't, it's a prominent consulting company. They signed a MOU to foster growth of FinTechs and enabled such types of collaboration in the region. ADGM created the reg lab FinTech sandbox where FinTech participants could actually develop and innovate FinTech solutions in a controlled environment. And obviously the after effect of these efforts have not only provided FinTEch startup much confidence and support, you know, also kind of generated an acceptance from the public, making them popular, so to speak. It's kind of like in football or any other sport for that matter when sponsorships not only provide teams with the financial support they require, but also the added benefit of being part of the sponsors, PR tactics, which can help grow the public state and the team. On another front, the demographics and these kind of things definitely play a role. almost half of the population in the MENA region is younger than 25. And this factor alone allows for growing market of early technological adopters. Now, the younger, the population, the more flexible and adaptable they are to these types of technological investments and UAE in particular acts as a gateway to a wider region, and enables FinTechs to enter emerging markets across Africa, South Asia, and of course the middle East. Now this expanded region along with being an $8 trillion market is home to 3 billion people, with 70% of them, having limited to no access to financial services. Now, although the middle East constitutes about 1% of the global FinTech investment, this sector is growing at a compounded annual growth rate of 30%. This means that for a mere and significantly smaller investments, the growth levels are multifold in amount. Now at the same time as ADJM and BRC created these environments to foster FinTechs and enabled them to grow, the Central Bank of the UAE and the SCA, the Securities and Commodity Authority, they established a dedicated  FinTech office to set national regulations specific to the industry. In 2018, they launched the production strategy, which aims to convert 50% of government transactions to e-payment services to allow these FinTechs to partake in the game. And they're also then, different investment funds who have come up over the years, like the, [inaudible] f...