With me here at Money 20/20 is Faisal Al-Monai, Co-Founder and CEO of droppRWA. Faisal, welcome back. With Citi, BlackRock, and others all here in Riyadh this week, what are you most excited to connect with?
Definitely connecting with those names — although we already work with BlackRock, Apex, Citibank, Standard Chartered. But what I am eager to see is more companies from Singapore, Korea, and Japan. These markets are usually low-yield markets, so they are great buyers for our assets here which are considered high yield. I think they would be great partners, and we would be a great offering on their distribution networks. I also want to see funds or banks specialised in digital assets — because our assets are digital, given our work in tokenisation.
What does an event like Money 20/20 in Riyadh mean for Saudi fintechs standing on the global stage?
Two things. First, attracting investment — global FDI. Second, expanding into other territories in the region.
You said on our show before that Saudi Arabia will be the model other G20 countries copy. Standing here at this event — does that timeline feel closer or further away?
A lot closer. Today we are looking at tokenisation becoming a mainstream way of attracting FDI into the country and into the mega projects. And by nature, the buyers of tokenised assets — the capital buying tokenised assets — move a lot faster than regular capital.
Where do you see the next big push in tokenisation here in Saudi Arabia?
Since we last spoke, we are now tokenising coffee. So agriculture is definitely a major domain we are going after. We are also looking at tokenising gold and other precious metals. Diamonds. Anything mined out of the ground — silver, and more. In addition, we have just made an agreement with a major law firm that works with the top reinsurance companies in Bermuda, to look at a structure where we can tokenise — together with the regulator in Bermuda — insurance-linked securities, so that people can actually buy tokens into insurance policies. Tokenisation is going viral.
Your mandates have grown past $12 billion. What has to happen next for tokenisation to stop being a pilot and become how Saudi real estate actually trades?
The regulators have been really keen on paving the way in terms of policies — making sure anti-money laundering, fraud, and counter-terrorism financing procedures are instilled. I do expect to get transactional rather than pilot mode in Saudi in early next year. And I expect to onboard a lot of the assets we already have in our pipeline, which we are just waiting on regulations to finalise.
Thank you so much, Faisal, for all your insight on Money 20/20 and on tokenisation here in Saudi Arabia.
Thanks a lot for having me on the show again.
