On September 13, the UAE’s first platform bank, Wio, commenced operations. Wio is 65% owned by Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund ADQ and investments holding company Alpha Dhabi, with Abu Dhabi-based telco Etisalat and the country’s largest lender First Abu Dhabi Bank holding 25% and 10% stakes respectively. The new entrant is looking to shake up the UAE’s banking market before taking its ambitions further afield. Here, the chief executive shares his vision with The Banker.
Q: Wio bills itself as the UAE’s first “platform bank’’. How will this shape the way you do business?
A: We have three business lines. The first is focused on the launch of digital banking apps for customers; we make these apps easier to use and [by doing so] we empower our customers with new tools. The second is embedded finance. Here we believe that as digital enterprises go on platforms, everything from food delivery, to e-commerce, to healthcare platforms, the bank will have to work with this and create unique propositions for our customers on those platforms. The third is the launch of banking-as-a-service (BaaS) [platform]. [This approach] gives us a clearer, but a much broader role in banking, which we think is going to be the biggest driver of enabling the digital economy.
Q: Wio’s immediate priorities include a focus on small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). How will you calibrate your approach to this segment of the market?
A: When we started thinking of building the bank, it was during Covid-19 times, and unfortunately, one of the largest affected segments [resulting from the pandemic] was SMEs. We worked with about 100 SMEs to try to understand their pain points and how we can actually help them.
The first thing we’ve done is simplified account opening. With an SME’s permission, we integrate a lot of data from government entities and other sources so that the customer doesn’t have to input this data. [This means] we can validate a customer’s identity in real time. We’ve also broadened the scope of [the SME market]. If you are a freelancer or very small SME you might have struggled to open a bank account in the past, but now you can download our app and we have a dedicated account for freelancers.
[Beyond this], we have virtual cards, an invoicing capability that includes an integrated payment gateway, so SMEs can send a payment link on an invoice and receive money digitally, among many other services. We want to make sure we become like an operating system for an SME: rather than just providing a capability to transact, we want to give SMEs the capability to run their business better.
Q: As a platform bank, what are the biggest challenges you face?
A: I think there are a few things. I think traditional considerations, that we will always have to manage, include ever-changing regulations. But if we look at some of the specific things we need to tackle, the whole world is digitising so our team is absolutely important to us as we launch this interesting platform. We need to make sure we retain our people. We need to get talented people in new areas of technology and we need to always make sure our team is always up to date with what’s going on.
we need to get talented people in new areas of technology
The second major issue is changing technology. In a platform bank like Wio, we’re always updating our [products and services] and releasing new versions [of our offerings]. It’s always a challenge keeping up with what’s new, as technology changes. Finally, I think keeping focused on what is core to us and what is core to our customers and sticking to that. You can’t do everything; you have to pick the actions that are going to affect your customers the most.
Q: What are Wio’s growth priorities over the long term?
A: We will continue to focus on our SME businesses and help that ability to grow. And that’s incredibly important to us. On the digital app side, we are working on something really interesting for the retail consumer, by following the same fundamental principle. We want to make it easy and we want to enable our customers with tools and we want to empower them with insight and other capabilities. So we are testing a very interesting proposition with our customers. We should hopefully get [the retail offering] out sometime early next year, at least in beta.
If I look at the next two- to three-year term, we’re also working on both embedded finance and BaaS, we have two or three very interesting partners in each space. I’m hoping by the end of next year, we’ll have some strong use cases delivered in both of those areas. Beyond that, we look to develop digital apps with some more specialised capabilities where we see unique opportunities – which might be in trade finance – or wherever the opportunity is. Once all of these capabilities have been deepened in the UAE, we will then start taking them to other markets.
