Joining me is Ahmed Jaber, co-founder and CEO of Corb.
Ahmed, welcome to Austria.
Thank you very much.
It's a pleasure to be here with you.
Of course, thank you.
First, you said you can do it in weeks, not in years.
I wish it's me, but it's Corbi.
It's a company which can do it, and you're the CEO of Corbi.
I am the CEO and the co-founder of Corbi.
So the trick is very simple.
We don't touch the core.
Because for example if you have a building which was built 50 years ago, you don't go and renovate it to rebuild the foundations, so we are a channel between the core and between the customer, between the lending, between the payments.
So that's how simply we do it without tripping.
The foundation 100% 100% and you spent also years at Visa before uh before this.
What's the one thing banks still get wrong about digital transformation?
I think a lot of my friends in the banking industry might be disappointed in what I would say because it's a generic comment, I would say.
The majority of the banks take the transformation as a piece of transforming PDFs into a project plan, and that's it, while the real transformation is really about the customer.
The customer gets the service in how much time and instead of getting approval on the loan in 2 or 3 days, you get it in 2 or 3 seconds, and that's where the Fintech really gained big ground out of banking.
Uh, now Corby also expanded into the UAE, Saudi, and Egypt as well within a short, um, window.
Which of those three markets moves fastest on adoption, uh, let's say, and which one of them is still dragon?
Well, in my opinion, every country, its its own race.
So for example, Saudi Arabia, the speed of the digitization was unheard of in the last 4 or 5 years, especially with the Vision 23.
So they reached to, if you want to buy records, they reached their targets of digital payments to be 85% instead of 70% in 2023, 2 years ahead.
So they have exceeded their targets and it was supposed to happen in 2025.
Now they are at 85% digital payment, electronic payments, so they are sprinting.
That's what Saudi is.
UEE is a very advanced market already and very advanced infrastructure.
So I would say UEE is in the refining model.
Who can do it better, OK.
Egypt, for example, is a completely different race.
Egypt is loaded with 100 million plus people, loaded with infrastructure gaps, so Egypt now is loading actually a spring for the future, and the future will be in Egypt because there is a huge demand in Egypt on these services.
So everyone in its own race, and the three of them are doing great.
Um, now you, you mentioned Egypt and actually we cover also the Egyptian market here and we have been talking to a lot of like fintech, uh, people in Egypt and fintech companies in Egypt and it's really fascinating to see that at the moment.
Now, um, Ahmed, you went from 0 to 200 employees actually in major banking partnerships in about a year.
What broke first before you scaled that fast?
I would say it's me who broke first, my calendar, my timing, my everything really what broke first because if you think about it, we reached 209 employees in one year.
So it's hiring almost more than one resource every single day if you consider the holidays.
But really what was broken at that time beside me was also the communications, because if you have 20 people in a company they can agree and work on everything over a lunch.
But if you have 200 people, you need to bring too many people to the lunch or you need to have a better communication channel.
So with the growth and also with the world class way in which we try to deliver to the largest client, for example, for us in Saudi Arabia.
And one of the largest banks in the Middle East and globally as well, we had to deliver with very high quality, so we had to fix the communications issue and the hiring.
People didn't know each other every day saying someone new, and needed a bigger team to handle that.
Now we mentioned a little bit in the intro about banks in general, but let me Ask you about legacy banking systems now versus AI and machine learning. uh, what is the real friction that, um, when you're trying to build new technology into a system that has been there for a long time.
I would say what is the food of the AI?
The food of the AI is the data.
So if you give the AI the right data, the AI will do well.
And what is the biggest obstacle in the banking industry now?
The data is sitting in silos, so the lending department doesn't know what the payment department is doing.
The payment data lake doesn't know what the lending is doing, the ledger, the treasury, the customer base, the channels.
So the data in the banking industry. is not connected well and that was by design for security and risk and other considerations reasons.
So if we fix the data leak and the data pool and we give the right AI tool, then in this case you can reach your goal and you can utilize the AI properly in the banking.
But if you use the best AI tool ever you have.
And you are not fixing your data, forget about it because that will not take you anywhere.
You did something completely different from what you're doing now, which is an entertainer.
Also you ran the entertainer before.
Which is very different business from what you're doing now.
Um, what from that world you can say that you actually brought with you now in Corby?
That's a great question.
So the entertainer was about, I learned that the entertainer, the consumer, the obsession about the consumer, the customer, you know, because we were B2C and B2B at the same time.
So what I learned well at the entertainer is the customer needs and how to satisfy the customer because The customer can leave you in a second if they are going to have a bad experience and go to a different app or a different competition.
So I would say in a very simple way I learned at Visa how to digitize and how to grow the payments, and I learned at the entertainer how to protect.
Your customers, how to keep your customers and how to stop the customer leakage.
So that's actually what made Core B that I don't give up on both.
You brought two different experiences to Core B.
Now, now you talked about digitization and every bank now claims it's doing that.
It's digitizing, but how do you tell?
Right ones, the ones that are really digitizing and the ones that are not, and just like checking checkbooks.
Well, this is my personal view based on hundreds and hundreds of meetings I had and banks.
I had from Mauritania until Oman when I was managing visa with an entertainer in 11 markets.
First you have to look who is in the room.
So if you are having someone in the room like the digital department, the digital transformation department, without the P&L owner, without the CEO, without the man or the woman which is holding the P&L decision, you will know that whatever you're going to say it's going to be taken to PDFs or presentations, PowerPoints, and you never know what will happen after.
But if the CEO is interested to attend this meeting, this is my first signal in the room, and then I usually I ask a question to make sure that the bank is serious about it because the banks, they have the intention, but being serious about it means that you have a daily follow up, that you have a target, that you have a very clear target about what you want to do, not just milestones and things like that, not just a beautiful app.
No, it's much more deeper than this.
So the question is, what did you kill in the last 2 to 3 years, because in order to build something new you have to retire some new systems, you have to retire some procedures, you have to retire even some people who have the wrong mindset.
So I ask this question, and if there is a clear vision and understanding, what should I stop and what I what I should replace.
That's a signal for me.
So these are signals we learned in our career.
That's really fascinating.
Just like leave the old system behind and replace it with the new technology, exactly.
But step by step without interrupting the customer, without interrupting the consumer.
The consumer shouldn't feel anything.
The consumer should feel just appreciated, getting the right services, not waiting for a very long time, watching a beautiful app.
That will not help.
Not waiting for the loan for 3 days, and whenever you open a check, you see a beautiful app.
If you are able to get your loan approval in 2 or 3 minutes, it doesn't matter how beautiful the app.
Yeah, definitely.
Thank you so much for being here with us today, Ahmed Jabar.
Thank you.
Most welcome, and it's my pleasure again.
