Umair Tariq, Founder and CEO of Zamanat, joins FinTech TV’s Raghda Ibraheem on Wall Street to MENA to unpack a newly sponsored tokenised private credit fund targeting the GCC’s estimated $250 billion SME financing gap, at a time when only 11% of SMEs across the region can access credit, according to World Bank research.

Tariq’s diagnosis of the gap is structural rather than cyclical. GCC banks are built to lend to large sovereigns, government entities and family conglomerates, and Basel III risk-weighting makes SME lending less attractive still. In the UAE, SMEs generate more than half of GDP and employ the majority of the private-sector workforce, yet receive less than 10% of total bank lending.

Zamanat’s response is Zamanat Fund CEIC Limited, a DIFC-domiciled, DFSA-regulated closed-ended credit fund with a target size of up to $100 million. Interests are issued as ZM1 Investment Tokens on ZIGChain, managed by Truleum Venture Partners and administered by Apex Group, bringing the entry point for qualifying Professional Clients down to roughly $250,000. The fund is built for the $2 million to $5 million ticket size, too large for fintech lenders capped near $400,000, too small for banks that rarely underwrite below $5 million.

Tariq also explains why Saudi Arabia, home to roughly 1.3 million SMEs, anchors Zamanat’s deployment strategy, how the Kafalah guarantee scheme’s more than SAR 100 billion in guarantees has still reached only 28,000 of them, and what the company’s backing from Disrupt.com, the MENA-based, AI-native venture builder behind its founding capital, brings to how Zamanat builds and scales.

Zamanat is part of MFTA’s network across 22 markets.

Topics discussed: the GCC’s $250 billion SME financing gap, Basel III and bank SME lending models, DFSA-regulated fund tokenisation on ZIGChain, Saudi Arabia’s SME financing landscape and the Kafalah guarantee scheme, private credit versus fintech and bank lending, the Disrupt.com venture-building partnership.

Guest: Umair Tariq, Founder and CEO, Zamanat
Interviewer: Raghda Ibraheem, FinTech TV, Wall Street to MENA