Joining us today is Niall Dennehy, CEO of NestiFi, an AI-powered platform helping parents, children, and grandparents learn to invest and build wealth together. Built initially for families in the US and Europe, NestiFi now has its sights set on the MENA market. Niall, welcome to the show.
Good morning. Great to be here, thank you for having me.
As we enter the largest intergenerational wealth transfer in history, why are today's wealth platforms still not designed for families?
A lot of it goes back to the fact that traditional institutions develop products centred on the individual, not the family. They fail to take a holistic approach. What we're building with NestiFi is a platform that stays with the family from birth through inheritance — and really what we want to do is help institutions develop more meaningful relationships with the families they serve at all age groups. That encompasses financial literacy, and it encompasses the great wealth transfer. Around $84 trillion is scheduled to be passed down from parents to children to grandchildren over the coming 25 years. Traditional institutions typically look at the individual through the lens of KYC and AML and build their products from that prism. We take the holistic view — aunts, uncles, grandparents, godparents — they can all come together and have a relationship with the institution, typically but not always centred around the child.
You mentioned the family office of the future — with AI, investing, education, and collaboration all built into one platform. Why does that combination matter?
Access to the tools that make up wealth management is usually not democratised — it's not designed for the everyday individual. What we've built is the ability for people to access what we call a family office at their fingertips. Here's an interesting statistic: by the second generation of inherited wealth, over 70% of that wealth is lost. By the third generation, over 90% is gone. A lot of it comes down to bad planning, lack of financial coaching, and not knowing how to manage money properly. But in the age of AI, think about what you can now have in your pocket — a large language model that can codify knowledge that was once held by gatekeepers and make it available to everyone. That's what we're building. And it's not just for the adults in the family — it's age-appropriate for children too, gated in a way that's safe and secure.
Family wealth structures run deep in Gulf culture — multigenerational businesses, family offices, inherited wealth. Is MENA a natural fit for NestiFi or does it need a different approach than the US?
The region is hugely exciting. A PwC report we read recently says that over 50% of the MENA population is under 25 — the opportunities are phenomenal. And when you look at what the UAE and Saudi governments are doing as part of their national strategies, there's a real focus on youth development that encompasses financial literacy and wealth management. Culturally, the family is even more central in the Middle East than in the US or Europe. And Islamic finance principles — Waqf, Sadaqah, Zakat — are already built around spreading wealth and making it a family endeavour. The region is primed for this, especially with the work being done by VARA in Dubai and regulators in Abu Dhabi and Saudi Arabia openly embracing this space.
The UAE and the Gulf have moved faster than the US on digital assets and tokenization. How does that regulatory openness change NestiFi's playbook for launching there?
It changes everything. The embrace of crypto assets and tokenization in the Middle East — what VARA is doing in Dubai, what's happening in Bahrain — creates huge opportunities for digital assets including tokenized real world assets like commodities, bonds, equities, and ETFs. We've had to take a very conservative approach in the US and a cautious one in Europe under MiCA. But the open embrace of digital assets and tokenization in MENA — and particularly in the UAE — makes it the best region in the world to build out this offering. It's going to be fast, efficient, safe, and secure, and it gives families a genuinely new basket of assets they can pass down responsibly over time.
Thank you so much for your time. It's going to be exciting to watch NestiFi expand into MENA and beyond.
