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A top Saudi bank has joined the cap table of Abu Dhabi wealth tech firm Alpheya as it looks to roll out live services over the coming year.
Alpheya, which received a $300 million investment from the USA’s BNY Mellon and Abu Dhabi alternative investors Lunate after it was launched in 2023, now has a fully operational team and is deploying and testing on the client side. It has also added the Saudi bank, which is a key anchor client, to its cap table, according to CEO Roger Rouhana.
Rouhana, a former head of strategy at BNY Mellon, said the firm is also working with clients in the UAE and Bahrain, and is in advanced conversations in Kuwait. Alpheya maintains ambitions to have $25 billion assets under management by early 2025, but is not making revenue, AUM or profitability public.
Alpheya, founded on the back of an idea by Rouhana and BNY global head of growth ventures Akash Shah, employs 130 people, 40 in Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM) and the remainder in Eastern Europe and Germany.
Its remit includes provide tech solutions to banks, family offices, asset managers and advisors to enhance client service offerings including robo advisory, brokerage and portfolio management services.
Its mission is not to compete with institutions or banks, but Rouhana said such entities need to be aware that if they do not harness fast-developing technology, players such as stock trading and investment app Robinhood and remittances platform Revolut, who are already reported to be close to breaking into the Middle East market, will enter and take profits.
While the initial focus was B2B, Alpheya is now also looking at B2B2C with announcements likely on that front in the new year.
The nature of its business means that it is benefitting from its ADGM location, with access to brokers, third party platforms, and the city’s growing AI capabilities through Mubadala-backed G42 and Abu Dhabi’s Advanced Technology Research Council’s AI company AI71, Rouhana said.
These and other AI initiatives in the city give access to a pool of hundreds or thousands of AI engineers, and in return, Alpheya will help Abu Dhabi get a share of the value chain of wealth and asset management tech, he added.
Billions of dollars globally are being poured into developing AI agents to perform the every-day tasks of countless industries, wealth and asset management included.
Technology is sophisticated enough to allow an AI agent to provide talking points about the portfolio performance of a client to an advisor, for example, whether it is over exposed in a certain stock, or the news that moved the stock, Rouhana said, but he does not expect a fully-fledged digital portfolio advisor to be operational in 2025.
But, that is the intention behind the rise of artificial general intelligence (AGI) - the level of development some experts see as possible in three to five years.
While the pros and cons debate of AI - the advancements in technology possibly leading to loss of livelihoods for humans – carries on, Rouhana said the aim of the tech is to free up advisors from spending hours on paperwork, or, give them the tools to prepare for client meetings faster, giving clients more fast, diverse and efficient services.
He points to the algorithms and technology behind social media platforms that know their users so well they bombard them with personally targeted ads, saying it does not make sense that a bank, which manages your money or your wealth, does not know your preferences, or your financial goals, while social media does.
But, the process Alpheya is working on is about balancing creating wealth tech that can help facilitate financial decisions without being invasive, he said.
There also needs to be a build-up of an industry and culture that encourages investment, savings towards retirement and the future, beyond the traditional pension model, particularly in those countries where large sections of the population do not have such access, he added.
“I think Alpheya is going to bring investment to a wider audience, it’s going to widen the set of products that people are exposed to – we’re a doing a lot of partnerships with a lot of a third party platforms, if you are using Alpheya, we connect to all those platforms so it’s all integrated.”
Processes such as opening bank accounts, sometimes requiring multiple trips to a bank, should be possible in a digitised process which takes five minutes – with technology that also knows the consumer and their likely financial preferences.
The digital streamlining of such services by players including UAE digital bank Wio are why it has seen success in a relatively short time, he said.
(Reporting by Imogen Lillywhite; editing by Brinda Darasha)
