The UAE can help broaden Indian FinTech horizon

An Indian banker set to expand his start-up base to the UAE elaborates on the reasons behind this move. Rubique is a FinTech company based in Mumbai. We offer a lending marketplace platform which provides individuals and small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in the country with frictionless access to a wide range financial services products including loans, credit cards and insurance products. At Rubique, we aim to solve a number of problems in the marketplace for financial products in India, which is currently highly inefficient, time consuming and uncertain for both customers as well as financial institutions (FIs). Today in India, customers that require loans are often faced with time-consuming and uncertain application processes, and are regularly bombarded with follow up calls from a number of FIs' sales teams. At the same time, FIs face challenges in finding customer that match their risk appetites, and in managing their own loan application turnaround times. In summary, it is currently very difficult for consumers in India to efficiently find FIs that can fulfil their financial services requirements. We seek to solve these problems with our proprietary matchmaking algorithm - our marketplace platform has direct integration to a number of FIs in the market, offering consumers a wide variety of options, with instant credit approval decisions and real time application processing. In addition, fulfilment of loans is also handled by Rubique's network of tech-enabled business associates, making our offering an end-to-end solution for credit provision for the Indian market. We see many market similarities between India and the UAE. With $360 billion in loans outstanding and 8 per cent year-on-year growth, the UAE also offers a huge potential in lending which can be disrupted through technology. Today the region only has online comparison websites and currently has no fintech players who address the everyday pain points that customers face to avail loans or credit cards, or the pain points faced by banks. When we deployed our solution in India, we had taken these inefficiencies into consideration, and we seek to address them effectively with technology. As our model has been proven in India we firmly believe our journey in the UAE will also lead us to success in terms of making finance simple and accessible for customers by reducing ambiguity and providing them clear choices. We also see the region as being of particular importance for us in accessing ideas, partnerships, talent, and capital, on a global level. The ties between India and the UAE in terms of population of course facilitate this, though even beyond this aspect, the region has played a clear role in broadening our horizons. By way of example, Rubique has been selected by Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM), the International Financial Centre in Abu Dhabi, to be part of the first batch of its FinTech Regulatory Laboratory (RegLab) program. This comprises of five local and international innovative FinTech start-ups, and Rubique is one of the only two Indian FinTech companies selected. Rubique will play an active role in developing and testing financial services innovation within the region, helping to shape regulation and the broader FinTech ecosystem in the UAE. Manav Jeet is a veteran banker who set up Mumbai-based FinTech firm Rubique.