we have another great panel coming your way right now speaking on the future of fintechs and cashless economies it is a panel moderated by riaz nachny who is going to be joining us on the stage alongside anusha iqbal nada hassan and allah deen el majer can i please welcome you all to the stage please give them a warm round of applause hi everybody hope your day has been good so far a little hot today but uh hopefully we're in for a cool uh discussion so uh i'd like to begin by just asking each of our esteemed panelists to briefly introduce themselves and talk a little bit about what you do i'll go first so my name is aledin i am you may know me from the disney movie aladdin i've grown up since then and joined the fintech space so i am the chief payments officer at hyper pay for those of you who don't know hyper pay hyper pay is one of the leading payment gateways in the region so our job is to help merchants accept payments either internationally locally or with all the special alternative payment methods in the market and so that's a little bit about me a bit about hyperpay thanks uh aladdin my name is anisha i'm the co-founder of spoti we're a buy now pay data service provider that's currently operating in uae saudi and bahrain we effectively allow consumers to enhance their spending power at checkout by giving them deferred payment options um and we were recently acquired by a international player called zip code so now we actually have a presence in 13 markets so that's me in 30 seconds hi everyone i'm katrel neda hassan my background is user experience design so i'm an experienced designer and for the past four years i've been working with yap which is the first digital banking application to launch here in the uae and i'm the head of product experience there so we launched in the uae back in september you can check us out yap.com download the app give it a try fully digital banking application and we're expanding now to pakistan ghana and saudi arabia this year thank you all for those succinct introductions now everyone here has heard the expression cash is king it's almost a cliche at this point um but i think what our panelists today will make the case for is that this particular emperor has no clothes now i think before we get into the what it's important to look at the why so i'd like to get all of your opinions on or responses rather to this question should we strive for a cashless economy in the uae and if so what stands in the way and uh let's begin with nada so um definitely the answer is definitely yes we should be striving and i think the uae is doing an amazing job of being the leader in the region to actually go cashless and there's four points that why that makes that so important number one is convenience for the consumer and we know that we're living in a country where it's all about having a great customer experiences everywhere you go and if we want to actually provide that convenience for the consumer that's definitely cash for society is definitely one of the biggest benefits and also efficiencies for government as well so making sure that we're dealing with uh different ways of providing government services instantly but also looking at how cash flow societies helps us go away from a corruption as an example so there's a lot of efficiencies for governments there productivity for businesses is another major benefit and with obviously being a growing economy with lots of startups and businesses here cashless does help provide a lot more productivity and then fourthly is financial inclusion so getting people more access into the ecosystem of financial products and services is um is extremely important and cashless helps us to take it there as well yeah i mean i think just adding to that i agree with everything that you said is you know it's wondered convenience more than uh customer journey we saw this when uh with the changes that the pandemic bought i mean we all know that uh with everything shutting down physical stores even uh for a certain period cash not being accepted with deliveries uh people who had not used or had not had the experience of that luxury did so for the first time i think there's a there's a poll almost 70 percent of uh users were actually doing uh digital payments for the first time during the pandemic which is a very high number but once you went through that process uh i think going back is is very difficult and so um i do agree also with what the panelists the previous panelists said which is that you're probably never going to get to a cash zero society there will always some form of cash um whether it's an older generation using it whether it is simple convenience but uh i think the the foundations for a cash flow so moving in that direction have definitely been set and all have been accelerated because of the changes that the pandemic brought about so i mean from my perspective it's more of a regional aspect so i think the move to cashless is going to be fueled by two things obviously the governments play a big part in terms of the regulation in terms of financial inclusion as we said but there's there's a there's another aspect where there are real world problems that fintechs have to come in and fix so there are still like if we look at the b2b market today there's about like 90 of the invoices are paid in cash not just in the uae we're talking like on a on a scale across the region i mean i'm talking like your supermarket in the street all of that if coca-cola is delivering today they're really expecting a cash transaction there so what we really need to do is really have the ecosystem in place to go for a cashless approach it's coming where it's already we're already going through that transformation but it's still we still need more in the ecosystem to help that along so more fintics is really also the answer there thank you uh hello um and i think the key enabler really for a cashless economy being pushed by by fintechs is obviously uh technology and so anusha what kind of technologies are the um traditional retailers and businesses uh adopting and how are these technologies acting as game changers well if i just look at our own business right um we evolved by facilitating facilitating payments online which was already in a cashless state other than the cash and delivery element um for this but as as a business has grown we're seeing the demand for our service to buy now pay later has also come in on the offline channels right so again making the enablement of uh payment methods that were digital bringing them into the offline world is one way that retailers will be able to start moving away from cash because you're effectively giving them those those benefits um but it's i think just picking up what allah was saying it's also about the broader ecosystem and the way so for us for example the way we operate um when we're giving deferred payments with somebody whether it's online or offline we actually have to rely on quite a number of different elements to feed into that chain whether it's a kyc check whether it is understanding the consumer's ability to repay and we actually do that by relying on a number of other fintechs that are within the ecosystem we're not doing it on our own and i think that's what's been great is that you're getting so many people who are specializing in different things and feeding into that which then makes it easier for people like us to then offer that cashless i don't think a lot of people understand how many people you need to be in the chain to get like a bnpl approach like there's kyc there's id checks there's all that so it really you have to have that broad ecosystem i was talking about because without that you can't make a risk assessment on whoever is making you're taking the payment from so effectively when we're looking at any country today and we're doing a kyc check we really need to have like an e identity before actually rolling anything out on an ekyc approach so there's a lot of stuff that really needs to come into that ecosystem i was talking about yeah and i think that feeds into uh another thing which is the larger enabling environment that the state is set up right they're allowing these businesses to grow and develop and that's really i think what is helping it's not just retailers it's uh you know she was mentioning even the b2b segment for example facilitating payments anywhere is going to require a lot of people in that chain and the more players you have uh the easier it will be to become more digital and um anusha i think another key element here of course is um is trust uh you know whether that's from a consumer's point of view or from a potential partner's point of view and um on that note um i'm actually about to try your service for the first time on on sunday so i might tap you out for some do it sooner some tips uh but what what kind of strategies are being used to um to actually gain the trust of traditional businesses of small businesses um in order to actually uh sell them the technologies that they need it's such a it's such an important question and when we were launching our business that was actually one of the key things at the forefront of of of our team it was how we're going to get people to believe in what we're set what we're saying which is you as a consumer are not going to get charged for the service when they're so used to having paid for credit to begin with right how do you build that trust uh it's not easy it's not overnight and it's a number of different things brand awareness constant customer engagement so you have multiple channels now it's which makes it easier and difficult in a lot of sense right you cannot just be on facebook anymore you have to be on snapchat and twitter and and so and so and so forth right and um i think customer engagement uh allowing the customer to have a voice and listening to that voice and responding to it is is very important in building not just your brand but that trust element and then ultimately um that will resonate across the ecosystem and i believe nada had something sad on this no i'll just add to that because i think that point is really important um at the end of the day we're building products and services that can help benefit the consumer and as a business if you're not putting your customer at the center of what you do then you know you're not really you're not going to end up being able to be competitive or survive so when you are when you do have these technologies and you are approaching these traditional businesses and trying to get them onboarded to this new you know fintech experience or payments experience remind them of the consumer remind them of the customer and how this actually benefits them so bringing bringing that back into the customer journey and the touch points that they go through and the convenience that would be available to them the technologies that they traditionally wouldn't have access to being able to embed it with with new businesses and and products that can do that for them thank you uh andrew shad um now i'd like to apologize to the audience in advance for the term i'm about to use but uh certain sections of the media have picked up and blended the terms physical in the context of retail and digital and they've they've come up with the word digital and and i really really hate that and i i'm sorry now uh ella let's move over to you um how can cashless payment technologies actually help to bridge that uh digital or physical and digital gap the gap between physical stores and e-commerce platforms to create a new breed of smart retailers so you know although i don't agree with the term but what they're trying to do here is is really marry the convenience of an online transaction with the convenience of having a point of sale interaction and you know what what is what if you do the if you go to the point of sale today the checkout process is if someone uh punches in on everything on the till and then they present you with a point of sale poss for you to use one of your preferred payment methods the real goal is is that you know using all these latest technologies ar or whatever is that you can actually start doing your checkout process and and they're seeing that with amazon with their with their store where you just physically physically go in you pick up the items you want and you just walk out and boom the payments have been done now the the challenge is how do you actually transition that into a retail environment like a dubai mall or the mall of the emirates and and that's where you know there's a marriage of all these technologies and all together so the ar needs to understand that you know someone picked up a dress or and or the ai needs to understand that uh the just been picked up and as there was someone's walking around that the whole retail system talks to uh either a wallet or it talks to a payment method and boom the payment's been done and you walk out so this is this is where retailers are you know they're gravitating towards it it does take a lot of technologies a lot of that's where companies like ourselves come in so what we're doing today is we're targeting really large organizations and going look essentially all these technologies where you you know we used to offer were used to be given to financial institutions you're gravitating towards financial institutions today in terms of a technology setup why not to take the whole stack and start implementing within the organization under one under one so if like a huge group like landmark has multiple brands it doesn't make sense that each one of them has a segregated system on terms of the payment side just set up one group that manages the payment side and push everything under that and that way you know you're going to take advantage of all the latest technologies obviously but at the same time there's multiple efficiencies in terms of like adding new payment methods bnpl anything like that nice assume the guys here have the same approach they would like to bridge the gap also in terms of the physical yeah i mean and it's not in my in my mind that term is literally just following where the consumer is today the consumer is everywhere it is omni-chan you you have to be online you have to be um in stores right so fidget is a term but i think for me it's just uh summarizing again the consumer journey and making sure that you're where your customers and today the customers everywhere i'll add to that as well with one example that yap is dealing with with our expansion to ghana um and ghana country in africa so one of the things that's happening there is that we have this digital banking app that we want to take over to ghana where people are still the mobile penetration is quite high but not on smartphones so how are we going to provide a digital banking product to people who are not using these smartphones and this is where we take a look at what they're doing day-to-day and actually looking at how we can design a mobile money experience through um you know just the basic from a basic you know one of those old school phones by using the sms technology and it's it's again rethinking of your offering in different ways that benefit then the consumer that we can have more access which is extremely important so accessibility and affordability in the space is one of the main things that we need to be thinking about when we are if we do you know focus that consumer and look at the benefit that we're trying to provide to them through the digital experiences that we're designing okay now uh ella i'd like to switch over to the extremely thrilling and sexy subject of regulation um now we've all heard you know at the prior session to this today throughout yesterday whether it was at the main stage or the fintech stage right here we we've heard uh speakers um extolling the virtues of the cashless economy and it seems to be moving very fast however are you seeing regulators being able to keep pace with the rate of change at the moment and um what what kind of challenges are these regulators actually posing to your work so what i have to say is like from our experience the regulators have been you know uh up to they're keeping up pace with what what's going on in the market the problem is is that you know regionally we haven't had the learning experience that europe has or the us has i always akin payments fintech whatever is happening in the region to how um like landlines were pushed you know they didn't push out any landlines in africa they just erected the 3g 4g antennas and boom you had all the because it just didn't make sense and that's exactly what's happening in the region is our the consumer the merchants even the financial institutions they want the latest technology they want the latest offering out there so you know bnpl is really fresh it's it's it's it's it's it's like a new industry but effectively it's it's you know we have companies here that are offering it in the market so the regulators have had to actually keep quickly get up to speed on on the the new fintechs some of them what they've done is they've set up sandboxes to really understand what the technology does how they can regulate and make sure for example that they're protecting the consumer but at the same time they're not impeding the the process so we've seen like here in the uae so new laws around uh retail payments we've seen uh in saudi sama release laws also how to govern if you're issuing cards if you're uh basically doing any payments that there are the testifiers of financial institution but also seeing it like in egypt now also so um like they just announced a new law where effectively everything has to be regulated under the fra there so there is a there's a obviously there's always going to be regulation but it's really um it's not as impeding as we expected it to be to be honest the regulators have really done a good job in understanding what the businesses are doing and they've tried to um you know give them as much room as they can within the regulatory environment and um allah just to follow on from that what are some widely held misconceptions you actually see in the market with regards to regulators and the role they play so i think everybody thinks of a regulator of as a big brick wall that's going to stop everything but effectively you know when you look at it the sometimes what they're looking to do is really to understand what the product does that's one thing and then effectively be able to you know tell you exactly what you need to do because there are definitely some protection requirements from a consumer perspective etc but on the other side they're also trying to ensure that there's a push towards as we say cassius economy and the cassia society financial inclusion is now a big player open banking is going to be a big player so what they're trying to do is to create a very good ecosystem under a regulatory perspective to have that in place so like most of our business in saudi is in saudi so we've seen like sama come out with very clear early adoption regulations for open banking and how that's going to be used um we're seeing in uh the same in in in in egypt also in terms of the regulatory environment and what they're trying to do is is really there's there's really economic uh microeconomics going on so what people don't understand in terms of the region is that every country has a has a specific approach to how they're dealing with the regulations but there's also always a secondary market that's going on so for example in egypt there's a like a lot of cash being going around in a secondary economy that no one knows about or basically like if someone comes in and does the plumbing good job for you you're gonna pay them in cash and a lot of this is just literally not captured so the regulator is really trying to have fintechs come in and try to plug any of these holds also so they can actually start capturing what's going on and have a reflection on even on the gdp of the country because i mean there's been a few studies out there and probably you guys have seen them that like moving towards the what kovit19 has done for cashless and then for some gdp and in certain economies has been transforming like there's been three or four percent uptick in certain gdps just behind the move towards a cashless setup for certain uh certain industries yes um absolutely i mean i i i work with visa quite extensively as a client and that that is something which they're always pushing um particularly uh in the wake of the pandemic the the shift uh digitization of payments by small and even micro-sized merchants you know as you said the street vendor um the souk marketplace person yeah i mean in in saudi for example um there was uh one of the the the regulatory requirements that came out was like any any supermarket had to start accepting um they had to accept credit cards and they had to accept digital wallets and they had actually a cap on how much cash they could actually carry so like all of a sudden you had a hockey stick uh acceptance on the physical i think like uh media which is the local scheme they hit their target within less than a year for for what they wanted to do like in 2023. so the same thing in egypt in egypt the regulator came out with a program where they wanted to push out like 30 000 points of sale in the market and what they did was they subsidized all that it's an amazing project like no one hears about this stuff because you have to be in the industry but effectively what they did was is that they went to the banks and said look we'll finance like all these points of sale push them out give us send us the the the bill we'll uh we'll pay like 80 percent of it it's amazing like now like you have uh this guy who has a what we call an arabic like a small supermarket that sells anything in the street and then he basically can actually do like utility bills he can accept uh payments it's it's crazy and that's being powered by simply the qr code payments um actually it's you can accept everything on it's basically what they've done is is they pushed it out like to a fourier they've pushed it out like to a man or all these guys they're all fintics in in egypt and what they've done is they're doing payment facilitation so you know effectively they they just sign up the merchant and they'll accept they they don't have to go back to like a a bank to get all the paperwork done so effectively like your average like guy could could just take out a point of sale machine and you can pay you can pay there and then it's it's it's crazy and so anusha oh sorry to what he was saying is that you know uh regulators have the unenviable job of facilitating innovation while protecting the structural integrity of the economy and it's not something easy to do but our experience with regulators you said they're not a brick wall they're open to communication and i think it's particularly our experience which has been in bahrain saudi and uae we haven't done much work in egypt but it's been um they're extremely open to understanding new ideas and giving the opportunity for new businesses to grow as long as you're engaged with them so i think that's the key it's about engagement and they're they're they're very reciprocals it's not a brick wall that you had so i mean even in jordan they just released the law like a year ago and to our detriment but it's good for everyone like they basically capped the commissions you can accept so basically they went like look because there was like people paying like three and four percent on credit cards they were like we're not going to have any more of this it's like a maximum charge is like two and a half percent straight away they like people people know what they expect on the on like what their expenses are for credit cards okay thank you guys that's uh that was quite illuminating um now nada i'm gonna ask you a sort of macro question if you like um what do you see as the future of the fintech industry across the region and do you believe we're going to have more collaboration or more competition going forward so i think the future of fintech is a very loaded question because you know there's so many different things that can happen with all the different types of businesses and fintechs that are popping up the one thing that i see for the future of fintechs that will actually be succeed in in this region is those that actually focus on impact and making a difference in the consumers lives we're living in an age of the consumer where if it works for the consumer if there's an impact and there's a benefit to what we're doing and providing then these fintechs will be able to actually make a difference um and succeed in this region otherwise you're just gonna have like we can look around us at this conference and all the you know all the different startups that are here there's so much happening and there's so much that we can do in the payment space in the fintech space um but are we doing this to benefit the consumer are we doing this to make an impact in the customer what i see happening in the future fintech is the consumer demand for impact in their in their financial well-being will be uh ex will will be what will lead this space and that will require that goes to your second part of your question that will require collaboration because if we have um digital banks like yap ourselves only focusing on what we offer and not opening up our ecosystem to other fintechs and other players to come in to benefit the consumer we will not succeed in making a difference in the consumers lives but we'll also not succeed as a business and i think it's a very important note for all fintechs and all businesses in the space to really consider the power of collaboration to open up their ecosystem to open up their technologies to link through apis or other new techs to to be able to link all those companies together in order again at the end of the day to benefit you the consumer in your financial well-being and understanding and making payments easily and quickly in financial inclusion and of course in affordability of these financial products we don't want to be creating products that users can actually access because you know it's it's costing them too much or it's um it's they don't they won't have access to it through specific devices or even in different locations and spaces so that is that's how i sort of see it and that's the type of um mental space that our business thinks about every single day when we're designing these fintech experiences thank you uh for that nada um i believe we have a couple of minutes left and i thought it might be a nice opportunity to uh open the floor up to any any questions does anyone have a question for our panelists speak now or forever hold your silence wow no questions your responses were so clear that they leave no room for questioning um okay i i have a question unlike our audience um now just cashless economies how i know this was asked towards the end of the last session as well but i'd like to have your take on it how how far away do all three of you see a truly cashless society uh emerging um so i again i think i i i did agree with what the last set of panelists said that we're never going to be cash zero uh there will be some form of cash but and i think um everything that's happened in the recent past has accelerated so if you'd asked me this question said three years ago i'd say you know for this region you're probably looking at 10 15 years and you know now that's probably been outside the next five six years you'd be in a very uh digital dominant uh economy as opposed to cash less economy is what i would say okay um not so i i also think that we're just a few years away from it if we end up in another pandemic which inshallah we won't but if we do then call us it's over no more cash and you know we're seeing that the world you know when we think about sort of this this space you know you have to look at what's happening in the full ecosystem and you know politically environmentally and we can see that this is a trajectory that we're moving forward to so i can't give a date but definitely this is a society that we're we're moving forward to so it's it's gonna happen very soon i believe and and hopefully for the better and i don't think just for the uae but when i look at the region i work a lot in iraq as well i have a colleague of mine who's right here from iraq and they just launched the first digital bank in iraq and if a country like iraq is also going to move forward with um into this sort of uh you know cashless space then you know who what's what's going to stop it it's going to happen very soon final thoughts hello yeah i mean the guys hit the nail there uh i mean basically i'm i'm i've been banging about uh cashless four years so i mean i think we're very on the cusp of it that's that's in terms of where we are just uh needs a bit of a nudge here or there and another fintech maybe so june of 2026 hopefully it's earlier because you know you know we're always looking for that high kid transactions to come in all right well thank you so much um anusha nada um can you please give our uh panelists a round of applause thank you everyone thank you thank you you
2022-08-07