Banking and financial service resources

What’s happening? Until the advent of Robo Advisors, financial planning was typically the preserve of the wealthy. Most human advisors require clients to have a minimum of $100,000 of investible assets and charge between 1% and 2% a year. In 2008, Betterment launched the first Robo Advisor, these services use algorithms to invest assets for […]

In the Arab world, more than 70% of adults and 4 out of 5 businesses would benefit from greater access to financial services, according to The Alliance for Financial Inclusion. Access to banking varies widely between countries but the importance of the issue in the Middle East is shown by the Arab Monetary Fund’s support for […]

There are 1.7 billion adults around the world without some form of bank or payment account, and the majority are in the developing world. As the G20’s Global Partnership for Financial Inclusion shows, enabling this unbanked population to access financial services is a global political priority. The World Bank’s Global Findex report highlights how financial inclusion can help people […]

People far brighter than I have been suggesting for some time that banks risk becoming “Dumb Pipes”, losing control of the upper layers of customer engagement to more agile FinTech firms and simply providing access to the intra-bank money transfer and deposit services that they are uniquely regulated to deliver in most developed markets.  Now […]

Insurtech could inject new life into the Middle East’s lagging insurance sector, but more than that, it could help companies reach brand new customers. Technology has the power to disrupt the insurance sector in the Middle East, transforming the types of products on offer and finding new ways to reach customers. Insurance has always had […]