Two leading FinTech firms, Aion Digital and Qarar, have today announced a joint initiative to accelerate the growth of digital lending across the Middle East.
The collaboration is set to revolutionize the credit market across GCC and the larger Middle East. The traditional bank financing market has been facing serious headwinds, especially for retail and SME customers. The initiative will allow traditional and challenger banks to offer instant financing to their customers, a first for the region, by combining Qarar’s award-winning risk algorithms with Aion’s intelligent banking platform.
Aion’s banking platform is used by banks across UAE, Bahrain, and Kuwait to offer digital solutions to their customers. The platform embeds artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to help banks improve their decision making. Qarar’s deep analytics engine enables banks to make risk-managed, consistent business decisions by intelligently processing large amounts of data from multiple sources. Together, this provides real-time, comprehensive insights for banks to inform their credit decisions.
Zaid Kamhawi, CEO of Qarar: “Qarar welcomes this opportunity to join forces with Aion. Digital platforms are the next natural step in the future of financial institutions and will allow banks to onboard, assess and process lending applications in real-time using state of the art cloud-based technology. Our partnership with Aion comes to support the digital transformation initiatives sweeping the market and to meet customer demand for fast, consistent and accurate digital lending decisions.”
Ashar Nazim, CEO of Aion Digital: “GCC’s data economy is now valued at more than USD 5 billion and the data consumption in the region is growing faster than many of the developed international markets. This is a great opportunity for banks and challengers. Our partnership with Qarar is aimed to change the basis of customer risk assessment by banks. Together, we are creating a smart, connected lending ecosystem so banks are able to more accurately assess the credit risk and hence reduce their cost of lending.”