Joel Van Dusen, Mashreq Bank

As you're probably aware, we have a very important consumer digital bank. It's called Neo, it's award-winning, and we're onboarding thousands of new customers monthly. What you may not know is we have a wholesale digital studio, and this digital studio is focused on innovations for our corporate clients, which is unique in the region. The DNA at Mashreq has always been digital first and digital innovation. I've been in banking for a long number of years — I won't tell you how long — but banking has changed. Obviously we have the traditional relationship managers covering our corporate clients, but what is also stunning is we have circa 200 data scientists and coders that are focused on innovation and driving change to help our client base. We run with these digital squads. These digital squads are organized in an agile way and they're focused on rapid innovation. So we don't run projects on a waterfall or sequential basis — we focus on the agile method, so we're constantly bringing out new innovations, new changes, new versions on a monthly or bi-monthly basis. This is the approach.

Now, what do the squads do? The innovation squads in the digital studio are very much focused on a couple of key areas. First and foremost is client experience. We're a very client-centric organization, and most of the innovation that we focus on — most of our spend — is very much focused around customer experience and improving that. A large number of squads are focused on customer journeys, whether that be digital onboarding, the trade licensing process, account onboarding, or the KYC process. These are traditional pain points for corporate clients, so if we can make them smoother, more digital, and easier, it differentiates us. Similar to the consumer world, most of the CFOs' and treasurers' activities are migrating to mobile platforms, and we need to be at the forefront of innovating on that front. So there are squads focused on that, and then there are a number of squads focused on internal processes to make sure that we're working in a more efficient way and can respond more rapidly to our clients.

For example, we've collected data from around the organization into one golden data lake, and we're now applying machine learning and substantial data analytics to do a number of things. We're looking at this data to predict client needs and hopefully get information to the relationship managers quickly so that they can respond in a very timely manner to clients. Another way we're using the data is to focus on compliance and risk topics. The data can be used to predict red flags that may be compliance issues or risk issues and allow us to be on top of those potential problems early, to make sure that there are no issues going forward. So the analytics part is also a very important part of what these squads do.

Lastly, the squads are focused on new capabilities. You would certainly know that most of the credit risk distribution capabilities and a lot of trade finance capabilities are moving to ecosystems — they're moving to open banking, off-ledger, in the cloud — and we need to be able to access those, to connect through API connectivity and to stream solutions on a very rapid basis to our clients in these ecosystems. So that gives you a sense of what the wholesale digital studio is doing: very client-centric, but also very focused on using data to better the bank's ability to serve clients and to manage risk.

I mentioned ecosystems. One of the things I'd like to mention is we have just recently become a founding member of the DFC Launchpad, which is part of the DIFC FinTech Hive. It allows us to innovate with our corporate clients, to be in an ecosystem with startups and venture capital, and it gives us an opportunity to commercialize some of the digital assets that we've developed at the bank. Importantly, it lets us work with our corporate clients in a sandbox environment to innovate new capabilities.