Every business owner knows the split screen — the business banks on one side, personal wealth sits somewhere else, and neither side talks to the other. My next guest is trying to collapse that with AI doing the work a private banker used to do. Flex calls itself an AI-native private bank for high-net-worth business owners — payments, banking, and personal wealth in one stack. Joining me is the Founder and CEO of Flex, Zaid Rahman. Thank you so much for being here today.
Thank you for having me.
For people hearing about Flex for the first time — what exactly are you building and who is it for?
If you are a successful business owner, building a company is really hard. And the thing that usually is the most painful is finance. Finance is not just bank accounts and credit cards — it is about 20 different things. And each thing has a different solution that business owners need to cobble together in this fragmented ecosystem. We realised there is a huge opportunity to build what we call the full financial home for business owners, bringing business, personal, payments, credit, and back office together in a single place. This consolidation allows business owners to just focus on running their business rather than managing their finances.
You grew up in Dubai but are US-based. What are borderless entrepreneurs actually asking for?
There are lots of entrepreneurs in the world who are not really based in any one location. You have a lot of people moving to Dubai who may make that their home, but their business might be incorporated in the US, their clients might be in Europe, their suppliers in China. They need global banking infrastructure to manage their business all over the world. We are building for that global business owner. Dubai just happens to be one of these places where tens of thousands of successful high-net-worth business owners are moving to.
What is the real-time data from tens of thousands of businesses telling you about the health of the core economy right now?
One of the most interesting things about Flex is that we go deep trying to understand our business owners from a credit perspective. Through that we have real-time live data access to tens of thousands of businesses and their bank accounts every single day. And what we see is that the core economy — construction, logistics, manufacturing, wholesale — these businesses are growing even faster than before. Part of the story is that these businesses are using AI solutions to find new productivity and efficiency. We have seen our average business owner's net worth expand 20% year over year. We have seen our average business's revenue expand 40% year over year. These are real businesses.
Why are ordinary businesses reaching for stablecoins?
Businesses need to move money all over the world. Global B2B cross-border trade is $50 trillion a year. 95% of that is still on legacy rails. If you send money from the Middle East to the US, that transaction can take 3 to 4 days. In those four days there might be FX fluctuations that destroy the margin of that transaction. Business owners want predictability — knowing at the moment the transaction happens what the rate is. We launched stablecoin payments allowing customers to move money anywhere in the world instantly and cheaper.
What does the AI CFO vision actually look like?
We describe ourselves as an AI-native private bank. Every single layer of our business we are using AI. A lot of our business owners — even though they are successful — may not have enterprise-level finance teams helping them. So we think there is a huge opportunity to build an AI CFO for business owners, providing accounting, tax advice, and wealth advice using AI — like the experience a high-net-worth individual on a stock exchange would experience anywhere in the world.
Thank you so much for joining us.
Thank you, thank you.
