About Faisal Toukan
Faisal Toukan, CEO and co-founder of Ziina, said in a May 2025 interview with the JIMCO Technology Fund that the company’s vision is to bring financial freedom to every person in the Middle East, serving both individuals managing daily finances and businesses seeking to scale. He described Ziina as a platform that connects users with card schemes like Visa and Mastercard, the Central Bank of the UAE, and partner banks through software designed to provide a "10x experience." Toukan noted that the region is well-suited for fintech due to a young, tech-savvy population and high mobile penetration, and he argued that investors should back Middle Eastern fintech players because a "perfect storm" is enabling financial freedom.
Toukan stated that Ziina has seen exponential growth, with user base and annual volumes increasing nearly tenfold year over year for the past four years, and that the company is evolving from a payments provider into a full-service financial stack. He credited early investor JIMCO with showing high conviction from the start and described the partnership as combining Ziina’s agility and technology with JIMCO’s legacy reputation. Toukan also emphasized that Ziina is licensed by the Central Bank of the UAE, a process he said involved prolonged regulatory work to gain trust, and that the company maintains quarterly reporting standards to prioritize customer safety before product innovations.
Source: AI-verified profile updated from Faisal Toukan's recent appearances.
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Transcript (1 segments)
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Faisal Toukan0:07
We started off just four years ago as a team of three people in the basement. From day one we always said that the vision is to bring financial freedom to every single person in the Middle East. That means whether you're an individual navigating day-to-day finances, from savings to loans to payments, or a business starting from inception and scaling it to similar ambitions as any startup in the world, we want to be your partner in that journey. So the way the technology works is that on the surface it's extremely simple: sending and receiving money, receiving money as a business. But below that, you're building code that keeps a lot of checks and balances in play. You're working with card schemes like Visa and Mastercard, you're working with the central bank of the UAE, you're working with partner banks. Essentially, Ziina is the web that stitches us all together through top-tier coding and software to provide a 10x experience for the individual or the business using the platform. Technology is really important because especially in our region, where the average age is 27 years old and mobile penetration is above 100%, throughout our region everyone has smartphones, they're young, they're tech-savvy, and the GDP is growing at one of the fastest rates internationally. The young population should be navigating their financial journey, whether starting a business or managing personal finances, purely through an application. So the region is ripe for financial technology to come in and replace the old ways of banking and interacting with finances. It's important that investors back fintech players in the Middle East because there's a few things going on that drew this perfect storm for financial freedom to become a reality for every person in the region. And Jimco, we were privileged to partner with from day one. They had very high conviction from our early rounds and have doubled down with us ever since. It's really important to have these kinds of partners because in the early days of fintech, you face a lot of challenges from commercial, regulatory, and legitimacy perspectives. What ends up happening is legitimate partners like Jimco, who have built a family business for decades, partner with young fintechs like ourselves to combine the best of agility and cutting-edge tech with legacy strong reputation and robust systems. It works out as a strong combination, so it's good for the ecosystem. As a result, we've seen exponential growth, almost 10x year over year for the past four years in our user base and annual volumes. Ziina is now evolving from being a payments company to a full-service financial stack. Over the coming years, you'll see Ziina roll out more services that align with people's full financial journey on a day-to-day basis. Ziina is proudly licensed by the central bank of the UAE. We worked over a prolonged period with the regulator to gain their trust and the ecosystem's trust to handle people's money. We have reporting standards almost quarterly that ensure everything we do is with customer safety at the forefront before any product innovation. For us, it's a massive stamp of approval and a good vote of confidence from the ecosystem that we're on the right path to providing those financial services.
