One to two months. That is how long a worker arriving in the UAE once waited for an Emirates ID before an account could be opened and a first salary paid. With a passport alone, it can now happen on day one.
Nameer Khan, Chairman of the MENA Fintech Association, guest-hosts a special edition of Capital Markets: Wall Street to MENA on FinTech TV. He sits down with Syed Ali, CEO of myZoi, the UAE financial inclusion platform backed by Standard Chartered’s SC Ventures. His questions go to the issue most inclusion efforts never resolve: how to serve low-income workers in a way that is commercially viable rather than charitable.
Ali traces myZoi’s starting point to research about six years ago. Almost everyone in the UAE owns a smartphone. For workers on modest wages, though, fear of scams and mistrust of digital money kept them out of formal finance. Small ticket sizes kept traditional institutions away. myZoi’s answer was a light, employer-led go-to-market with low acquisition costs, which by Ali’s account now spans more than 1,100 corporate partners. The company also took on the job of educating its customers.
On day-one access, he credits the UAE as one of very few countries that lets a new arrival open an account with a passport. myZoi worked with government institutions to make that change happen.
From there the product set widens. Earned wage access lets a worker draw part of a salary already earned before payday. For people with no financial footprint, that is an entry point to credit. On remittances, myZoi works to cut intermediaries and connect more closely to domestic clearing systems in beneficiary countries. Its first-to-market one-to-many transfer lets a worker send money to several family members for a single fee, as part of a push toward the UN’s sub-3% remittance cost target.
Topics discussed: financial inclusion as a commercial model, trust and financial literacy, passport-based day-one onboarding, earned wage access, remittance costs and payment rails, one-to-many transfers.
Host: Nameer Khan, Chairman, MENA Fintech Association
Guest: Syed Ali, CEO, myZoi
