Gulf trade with Asia just hit $516 billion a year. The economy has shifted east faster than the infrastructure moving money across those borders. My next guests just got licensed here in Dubai to help close that gap. Joining me are twin brothers and co-founders of ARP Digital, Abdulaziz and Abdulla Kanoo. Welcome to Wall Street to Mena. Abdulla, what is the one thing you saw actually broken that made you build ARP?
We looked at the market and asked: what are the GCC's strategic strengths? One of the most important is that it is a hyper connector — linking the GCC with developed markets, and with undeveloped markets. Southeast Asia is very big for remittances. China is very big for import and export. Africa is important for commodity trades. What we realised is that there is no single integrated, regulated provider able to create a seamless experience across all of these — without fragmenting everything across multiple different providers. That is what we said we would do within one platform at ARP.
Has payment infrastructure actually kept up with the boom in Gulf-Asia trade?
I do not think it has — and there is a reason for that. For you to facilitate seamless cross-border transactions, you need an integrated experience built on aligned infrastructure. Between here and Asia, you have Southeast Asia, China, and Hong Kong — each with its own regulatory nuances and compliance frameworks and no standardisation between them. A provider bridging those markets has to understand all of those nuances. That is why when we build ARP, what is very important to us is having product feedback from the client itself — because if you do not have that, you become a generalist. And a generalist is not able to create much value.
Abdulaziz, you just received your full VARA license. How does that actually help the work you do?
It enables us to service UAE corporates. We can facilitate transfers between stablecoins and fiat currencies — so we can effectively access and service the market.
Most GCC businesses would switch payment providers today if they could. Why?
It comes down to a few things. A lot of these businesses are either SMEs or larger firms. Larger firms are very well served by banks. SMEs typically are not — they tend to get value transferred through exchange houses. The PSP and cross-border market here has been set up really for retail, because retail has a quicker customer acquisition cycle. You are not dealing with a corporate with many stakeholders. So providers optimise for retail onboarding and retail experience rather than understanding the pain points of an SME. An SME's real pain point is: how quickly can I move money? Do I have an integrated experience? Am I doing it in a compliant way? Do my rails actually account for all the information coming from my customers, my invoices? When you give something purpose-built for that customer, the result is much better rates and much better transfer speed.
Thank you both. It is very exciting to see the story of ARP Digital develop.
