Generation start-up: 'Black sheep' forges his own path to break down banking barriers

Entrepreneurship “is something that I’ve been raised with,” says Abdullah Almoayed, the chief executive of open banking platform Tarabut Gateway.

“I was created and raised right into a business family that's been a trading family quite known in the centre East region going back four generations,” he said.

Yet, instead of taking what would have appeared to many as the natural route into AK Almoayed, a family group owned group with construction, building materials and other divisions that is trading for more than a century, Abdullah “decided independence was a thing that was pretty important” and went his own way.

“I’m definitely the black sheep in the family, I’ll tell you that,” he says.

After graduating with a degree running a business management from the University of Westminster and an MBA from London Business School, he started a career in investment banking.

While there, he was raising money for several projects, including private equity deals and property schemes “that weren’t really in my control”.

“I believe [that] sparked a lot of who I am today ... just because a large amount of the projects got halted, many of them went bust and it had been really beyond my control.”

Mr Almoayed wished to continue to take action that involved raising money but allowed him to think big regarding impact.

“And technology presented this opportunity regarding having the capacity to build something of regional scale,” he says.

Mr Almoayed says technology had already “democratised” many industries, but financial services was “still quite definitely exactly what it had been 50 years back”, with a huge selection of banks still operating in your community. The industry also lagged behind many sectors when it found serving customers.

“I feel that the regulators in the Mena region are beginning to realise that there surely is a customer experience gap between how you handle any consumer-facing proposition versus your bank. And I believe that's needs to change.”

He started Tarabut Gateway in 2017 to create an open banking platform, using Application Programming Interfacing, or APIs, to permit banking systems to integrate with each other and with the growing band of regional financial technology companies.

When the company first began, none of the central banks offered licences or experimental "sandboxes" allowing FinTechs to utilize live banking systems.

“So no investor would touch us,” Mr Almoayed explains.

As a result, he previously to bootstrap the company, paying the salaries of staff despite the fact that the business earned no earnings as he built the team. He also had to hustle - there was little incentive either for lenders or regulators to let people into their systems, even if the target was to finally improve them.

His first letter to the Central Bank of Bahrain, the regulator in Tarabut Gateway's market "got a difficult objection", Mr Al Moayed says. Another letter also met with a refusal, but an offer to keep a dialogue. Eventually, he secured a gathering, which led to the business securing its sandbox licence.

Regulators over the region are warming to the potential benefits of open banking. The Saudi Central Bank published its Open Banking Policy in January with a view to presenting it set up next year. Abu Dhabi Global Market published its framework for Open Banking earlier this month.

An open banking platform provides customer the opportunity to access accounts from different banks, credit card providers and other financial services companies in a single place, permitting them to easily and immediately transfer payments between them. Tarabut Gateway supplies the software to facilitate this, and charges the banks to put it to use under a "software as a service model".

If data may be the new oil in the centre East then we're building the region's modern pipelines

Abdullah Almoayed, founder, Tarabut Gateway

Asked why banks don't just build such systems themselves, Mr Almoayed says there is "no chance any bank in the world, whether it's Morgan Stanley or JP Morgan or anybody" can build all of the capabilities and the kind of data enrichment that open banking platforms can provide.

"Banking is centered on partnerships," he says. "What we do is create an infrastructure which allows for partnerships.

"We secure the pipes. We say that if data may be the new oil in the centre East, then we're building the region's modern pipelines."

With the regulatory framework moving ahead and the business enterprise already serving a lot more than 25 banks, it raised $13 million in a seed funding round in February led by Berlin-based capital raising firm Target Global.

"I believe our timing, thankfully, has been absolutely perfect," he says.

After establishing the business in Bahrain, it opened in the UAE in October this past year and has held talks with both Dubai International Financial Centre and ADGM who "both love what we're doing".

"The marketplace needs it. We've 100 FinTechs in the UAE that have no usage of bank APIs. The banks want to collaborate with FinTech. So all of these things are coming together and we want to be this sort of enabler within the ecosystem."

The funding can help the company to grow its team - it is looking to add 25 staff to the 35 associates already in place by the end of the year - and develop its open banking platform over the region, Mr Almoayed says.

"We will need a lot more capital as it grows, but it is the first rung on the ladder to proving scalability."