Abu Dhabi is the capital of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), where the city has built a growing fintech environment in recent years. Key Abu Dhabi partnerships have been a crucial part of the process and continue to go ahead, despite the global pandemic.
Trialling an inventory monetisation programme with Abu Dhabi-based manufacturers and lenders – [email protected] and iMass investments
Following a joint market assessment, [email protected] signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Khaled Abdulla Almass and his investment company, iMass LLC to facilitate the expansion of [email protected] into the Middle East market. [email protected] is a Fintech company that is owned by Italy’s Avantgarde Group, which is traded in the London Stock Exchange (LSE).
The fintech platform can lend money to businesses with tangible, re-sellable assets that are used as security for the loans. However, they remain in customers’ warehouses, which are tracked via a monitoring platform. Those loans are securitised and then sold to investors; should a company default then stocks can be re-sold.
iMass Investments, founded in 2007, was created to invest directly in leading companies and major development and commercial projects in the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region across various industries. iMass uncovered via a market assessment that within the UAE region there is an underserved market for inventory monetisation of up to $50 billion USD for principal categories within imported goods, and $28 billion for the main categories of non-oil goods produced in the UAE.
Development of Fintech solutions in Digital Lab to support the small and medium (SME) sector – Financial Services Regulatory Authority (FSRA) of the Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM) and Sunline
The FSRA of ADGM and Sunline Holdings, UK, Ltd signed an MOU to promote the development of ADGM’s fintech ecosystem that will support and connect businesses and markets in the Middle East and North Africa and the Belt-and-Road corridor, including developing digital financing and loans solutions for the SMEs to support and grow their operations in a post-pandemic environment, according to the Emirates News Agency.
The same source says, that as part of the MOU, Sunline will provide a fintech development suite in the ADGM Digital Lab, an online marketplace where fintechs and financial institutions, FIs, can co-create and test solutions to address challenges with direct oversight and engagement by the regulator. Harnessing the tools and collaborating with ecosystem participants in the Digital Lab, banks can create specialised end-to-end workflows for loan products tailored to the needs of the SME.
According to its website, established since 2002, Sunline is the leading banking software and technology services company in China. Publicly listed since 2012 the company has over 5000 employees worldwide serving more than 700 banking and finance customers. Headquartered in Shenzhen, Sunline has offices in Hong Kong, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and Singapore.
Piloting Contactless Payment in one of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region’s largest supermarket chains
As recently reported, LuLu Group, which is headquartered in Abu Dhabi, was founded in the early nineties and services over 1.6 million shoppers daily. It is the fastest-growing retail chain across 10 countries that include the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region, India, Egypt, Indonesia and Malaysia with over 188 stores and over 55,000 staff.
LuLu partnered with PayBy, a contactless payment solution to adapt their payment solution for their customers. Following a successful pilot project in Abu Dhabi, it is now operational across more than 60 LuLu hypermarkets and stores in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). To prevent the spread of coronavirus through currency or cards, the UAE Central Bank in March urged the use of contactless payment methods. In response to growing consumer demand, PayBy’s QR Code-based contactless solutions are supporting UAE retail businesses as they transition to recovery in the wake of COVID-19.
