UAE a marketplace for digital transformation
Hi-TRac
The author’s shorthand for Happiness Index, Infrastructure, Talent, Regulations, Access and Capital. The six pillars that make UAE a great place for a startup. This week’s article is about all six!
Speaking to a packed audience of over 1,000 on September 17, Ahmed Al Sayegh, chairman, Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM), stated: “It has been an exciting year since our first FinTech Abu Dhabi Summit in 2017 where we experienced a significant growth in financial services and FinTech activities. These developments are even more meaningful as we commemorate the Year of Zayed, remembering our late founding father Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, and his relentless pursuit of excellence for the country and people.”
Building on the success of the 2017 inaugural event that attracted close to 3,000 local and global registrations, the 2018 event comprised two full days of world-class exciting activities with world-class speakers, designed to unite the FinTech community and support the growth of financial services industry in Abu Dhabi and the Mena region. The event was exclusively organised and curated by ADGM.
The FinTech Bootcamp Day on September 16 was a purpose-driven, practical and engaging platform designed for FinTech startups attending 2018 FinTech Abu Dhabi. The day consisted of a series of interactive workshops by industry leaders and mentors focusing on topics including ‘The Role of Conversational AI in Regulated Environments’, ‘Lego Blocks in a Digital Economy’ to ‘Legal 101 for Startups’. FinTech attendees had valuable interactions with the ADGM ecosystem as well as its global partners. In addition, ADGM partner, Plug & Play, showcased a selected list of FinTech firms. On the Summit Day on September 17, senior Abu Dhabi leaders, global FinTech players and international regulators had open conversations on areas such as ‘FinTech and Technology as Enablers of Economic Growth’, ‘How to Train Your Algo’, ‘Open APIs and Empowering SMEs’, ‘Blockchain in Financial Services: Hyped Ledger’ and ‘Looking into Regulators Crystal Balls’. Richard Teng, CEO of the Financial Services Regulatory
Authority of ADGM, said: “Innovation, including FinTech and digital transformation, is part of
ADGM’s DNA. It influences and shapes our service offerings and regulatory framework. As an ecosystem developer, we aim to support Abu Dhabi’s leading position as the FinTech hub and nexus for the Mena area.”
According to a Mena funding report by Magnitt, close to $560 million worth of investments were made in over 260 Mena startups in 2017. The pool of ADGM’s RegLab firms deploys cutting-edge solutions to re-imagine how firms trade cross-border, receive credit, and make payments in both conventional and Islamic finance. These address the real needs of crucial pillars of the economy.
Another pillar for the development of FinTech in the region is creation of an ecosystem. To achieve this ADGM has synergised multiple initiatives. First, it announced the launch Mena FinTech Association, an industry-led not-for-profit entity to champion the interest of the FinTech community. ADGM is on the board of advisers.
Second, recognising the need for a vibrant technology cluster for the creation of a strong innovation ecosystem, ADGM has a tailored commercial licencing regime for tech startups and a professional services support programme to make it easy for tech startups to get off the ground and engage with the wider ADGM ecosystem. The third ecosystem area that ADGM has worked successfully on is to enable FinTech startups locally and globally to tap into a bespoke and powerful network of corporate partners to scale their businesses in the Mena region. Partnering with Plug & Play a year ago to co-create a structured FinTech accelerator platform has resulted in several founding partners including First Abu Dhabi Bank, Riyad Bank, Boubyan Bank, BNP Paribas and Finablr.
As a part of this ecosystem focus, ADGM will build a marketplace for digital transformation and financial inclusion, by partnering with the Asean Financial Innovation Network (AFIN) to leverage on the global API Xchange (APIX) platform. This will bring together FIs and FinTech firms between the Mena region and the Asia-Pacific region onto an online digital platform enabled by open APIs.
The unquestionable value of raising funds through well-calibrated regulation is always a priority for ADGM’s Financial Services Regulatory Authority (FSRA). Although it had already launched a venture capital fund to streamline the process to set up VCs, it recognised the large commercial funding gap between the VC funding stage and to the IPO stage. To address this, it announced the private financing platform framework to enable the creation of funding platforms among professional investors and networks. An interesting and pioneering move by the ADGM FSRA has been to set itself the target of being the destination of choice for crypto asset players. To achieve this, it introduced the first comprehensive regime globally for the regulation of crypto asset businesses in this region.