Panelists during the MENA Fintech Festival 2024 at the QNCC. Pic: Salim Matramkot
Doha: Industry leaders convened at the ongoing MENA Fintech Festival highlighting the overview of the Fintech landscape in Qatar and the MENA region.
During a panel session, the Founder and CEO at HyperPay, Muhanad Ebwini; the CEO of Spendwisor, Safarudheen Farook; Executive Producer at Fintekrs, Mohamed Mounir El-Ahwal; and Venture Partner GCC, Tenity, Maximilian Plank emphasised the opportunities, challenges, and risk of the financial technology sector.
The CEO at HyperPay, Muhanad Ebwini noted that Qatar Central Bank (QCB) is working on numerous initiatives to unlock “huge” opportunities provided the state-of-the-art infrastructure and mindset to transform the future of fintech.
He said “The huge opportunities today include $8.5bn digital transaction in Qatar and I think it’s easy to go up to $100bn in a very few years. What I’m seeing today is that our market is very dynamic and new opportunities come every minute.”
Elucidating on the market outside Qatar, he stated that the most important consumer products in the past few years are in Saudi and the UAE. “In Saudi, we can see for some merchants around 70 percent of the transaction just moved to ‘Buy-Now-Pay-Later’ today in our payment,” Ebwini said.
The market expert mentioned that the significant part remains at high risk and must be managed well including the deadline and payment from the consumers.
He pointed out that “Any fault in this industry will affect everything the company has including its trust, and therefore, it should be managed in a great way.”
Accentuating that “Fintech is not a lecture anymore”, the official said that it’s mandatory in every single industry, eventuating that payment ranks number 1 and will continue to remain in the same position.
Ebwini also said, “The most important thing in payment today is to do a look-alike solution for the sector and even sub-sectors and maybe one product - you have to customize the payment journey or you solve issues around the payment including the ‘Buy-Now-Pay later such as the payout technology, customised solution for insure tech.”
The CEO of Spendwisor, Safarudheen Farook explained collaboration with Al Jazeera Finance. “Using this partnership, they are bringing a lot of expertise to the table. This is one of the best parts we have and we have opened up for the first time in Qatar to partner with the financial institution in a very deep manner."
The expert added that Qatar unlike other regional partners has taken a different approach to expedite the sector by noting that the country’s openness toward partnerships ensures an optimistic outlook for the fintech industry.
