Two fintech firms, Aion Digital and Qarar, have partnered up to accelerate the growth of digital lending across the Middle East.
In a first for the region, the paring would allow traditional and challenger banks to offer instant financing to their customers, paving the way for peer-to-peer lending to be introduced in the future.
“Qarar welcomes this opportunity join forces with Aion,” said Zaid Kamhawi, chief executive of Qarar.
“Digital platforms are the next natural step in the future of financial institutions and will allow banks to onboard, assess and process lending applications in real-time using state of the art cloud-based technology.
“Our partnership with Aion comes to support the digital transformation initiatives sweeping the market and to meet customer demand for fast, consistent and accurate digital lending decisions.”
“The GCC’s data economy is now valued at more than £5bn and the data consumption in the region is growing faster than many of the developed international markets,” said Ashar Nazim, chief executive of Aion Digital.
“This is a great opportunity for banks and challengers. Our partnership with Qarar is aimed to change the basis of customer risk assessment by banks.
“Together, we are creating a smart, connected lending ecosystem so banks are able to more accurately assess the credit risk and hence reduce their cost of lending.”
Aion’s banking platform is used by banks across UAE, Bahrain and Kuwait to offer digital solutions to their customers.
The platform embeds artificial intelligence capabilities to help banks improve their decision-making.
Meanwhile, Qarar’s deep analytics engine enables banks to make risk-managed, consistent business decisions by intelligently processing large amounts of data from multiple sources.
Together, this provides real-time, comprehensive insights for banks to inform their credit decisions.