Michael O’Loughlin, USA Ambassador for the MENA Fintech Association and Managing Partner at Argonautic Global, joins Johnny Fernandez, where he has spent nearly a month after extending a trip to understand what Ireland is building and how it compares to what he has been helping build in Saudi Arabia and the wider MENA region.
His most important finding from 78 meetings in four weeks is the framing that resolves the comparison question: MENA does ambition, capital, and speed exceptionally well, as showcased at Money 20/20 Riyadh. Ireland’s advantage is something completely different, domain expertise, talent, global tech companies, universities, and a small-country ecosystem where regulators know the startups and startups know the capital. The winners, he argues, will not necessarily invent everything. They will connect everything.
On where Ireland fits in the global AI race, his read is grounded and optimistic: Ireland can be the testbed, a place to apply new AI innovations to real, practical problems, prove them, and showcase them to the world. That connective tissue role is uniquely suited to an island with deep global financial and tech infrastructure already on its doorstep.