Welcome back.
I am Scarlett Siber, and we are live here from Money 2020 Middle East.
I have another great guest.
I am so excited.
I've got to know him a few months ago, and I've been so impressed with what the Terrabut team has been doing.
And so Abdullah, CEO of Terraba, thank you for joining me today.
Thank you for having me, Scarlet.
It's great to have you here, by the way.
Thank you.
I'm so excited to be here and you know obviously we're sitting at the epicenter of of Saudi Arabia here in Riyadh.
Can we just talk a little bit, but you're an entrepreneur, you've done a lot of amazing things.
Why Saudi?
What's different about Saudi for you?
It's different.
There's a massive opportunity in my opinion.
I think that there is a There's there's regulations that are well ahead anywhere else in the world, and there's also digital infrastructure that makes this economy, market very, very interesting when it comes to innovation.
We talk a lot about leveraging data for lending, leveraging data to basically build a lot of these great financial models, and I think Saudi just makes one of the best markets globally.
And when you think about you're a fintech entrepreneur, like what is a FinTech scene like here?
We have over 1000 investors with us over the, you know, these 3 days, so just talk to us about that.
There's a lot of the, so what makes the Saudi market very different is there's a, there's a lot of the work that is required that is done.
I think personally this is one of the most sophisticated markets in the world.
You've got everyone on the cloud, you've got digital signatures that are already enforceable by law.
You've got digital identities across the board.
There's no. thing is unbanked in Saudi Arabia.
There's something everyone here is banked.
If anything, they're multi-banked.
So one of the things that tends to happen is you've got this financial gap that they're trying to address, which is more financial literacy, financial inclusion.
And the national, the national strategy is really set for you across the region.
So when you look at something like Vision 2030 or the financial sector development program, you don't need a crystal ball per se to to figure out where the market's headed.
You see certain pillars that are very important, and then you see what the government's doing to enable the private sector to really play a role in bridging that gap.
I think two of the primary themes that we've seen throughout over the last 5 years operating here.
Have been really about trust and resilience.
The moment you have these two aspects, then it really becomes about how you use technology to enable, and the government's really done a great job here.
And that's such a thing that we've seen across the the show so far is that combination of of trust and resilience which I love.
You started talking a little bit about the the uh the customers at the end of the day and being, you know, there isn't unbanked necessarily.
You talked about digital identity.
Can you give that example that you gave to me off camera about, you know, what happens if you don't pay for if you don't, you know, meet the loan?
Yeah, I mean, people underestimate.
People have this this misconception of Saudi Arabia when it comes to how digital the economy is, um.
People get married on an app.
People get divorced through an app.
Notary Pubs, um, and all of these things are completely digitized.
Electronic signature laws are enforceable. um, you've got digital identities across the board.
You've got social insurance that's completely digitized.
So when you have all these government APIs that are available for consumption.
As a lender, as a financial institution, whether you're on boarding a user or whether you're serving a user, including a digital judicial system, meaning if there's a, if there's a if there's a default, the execution happens digitally, you get accounts frozen, you get digital journeys frozen, you've got people locked out of the system until they pay.
So it creates a very interesting proposition when it comes to FinTech specifically and that's why I mean yesterday we just saw the $2 billion credit facility by Apollo, JPM, Goldman and and Citigroup, I think it was the Tamara, and it goes to show you people's private debt or or the debt markets really starting to pick up because a lot of this, a lot of the market is, is becoming really interesting.
That's very interesting and you know, sitting at the epicenter of FinTech globally, open banking is a topic regardless of where we're we're at in the world.
Obviously you have a firsthand seat for it here.
Can you just talk a little bit about what the process was like getting your license?
So we started, we are an 8 year old company.
We started in in Bahrain, got our license.
There then graduated from a regulatory sandbox in there, moved to the UAE, got our license there and now it just recently over the last, I think we've been here for about 34 years in Saudi Arabia.
The journey is very straightforward as it is in any other market.
We we also operate in the UK and and I think.
Getting into a regulatory sandbox, getting the regulator comfortable with what it is that you do, and then from there on proving a level of resilience and maturity that allows you to graduate and go into frill commercialization.
The one thing about the government here and how it operates or licensing process and how it operates is there is a high threshold to dedication, to resilience, to trust.
If you want to operate in Saudi, you need to be serious about it.
It is not you'd operate in a sandbox, but if you. get to level 3 cybersecurity maturity and things like that that I would say are the gold standard as to how a company that wants to operate commercially across the nation needs to operate.
It's pretty straightforward.
They've got regulations and within these regulations are the requirements that are out there.
Amazing.
Well, that's all the time that we have for today.
Thank you so much, Abdullah.
I appreciate all of you watching and back over to you.
