Digital banks — or neobanks — have proliferated in the Middle East region over the past few years, whether in the form of new, standalone banks or a proposition stemming from traditional banks looking to make their services more accessible and streamlined for a wider demographic. Banks in the region and abroad are looking at how to make their proposition stand out from the others, and how to make digital banking simpler, and globally accessible.

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Leading one of the region’s biggest and most rapidly growing digital banking propositions, Mashreq Neo, is Radu Topliceanu (LinkedIn), who joined the bank in 2023 and is credited with shaping Mashreq Neo’s strategy and spearheading its expansion beyond the UAE’s borders.

Launching Mashreq Neo outside of the UAE involved plenty of localization, negotiations with regulators, and exporting advanced tech solutions from the UAE abroad.

Topliceanu oversaw the launch of Mashreq Neo Egypt earlier this year. Now, he’s preparing to launch Mashreq Neo in Pakistan, and figuring out how Mashreq Neo can become a global, integrated platform for customers who are banking across several countries.

We sat down with him to discuss the technicalities of transferring tech and banking propositions across borders, the way AI fits into the future of digital banking, and a lot more.

The big takeaway? Digital banking in Egypt is still facing some challenges in terms of tech advancements, but the regulations are quickly adapting to make it more accessible.

Edited excerpts from our conversation:

EnterpriseAM: How’s the launch in Egypt going so far?

Radu: It’s going very well. We launched two acquisition channels: one that is internal and is very well received by the public; and another through a collaboration with e& that’s also going great.

The process of customer acquisition and onboarding is slightly different in Egypt [than in the UAE] because of the difference in regulations. Customers can download the app and open an account in no time, but in order for us to activate the account, they must visit a physical store to sign a paper.

We collaborated with Fawry and e& Egypt, to allow customers to close the fulfillment process through their branches. Now, Neo is available across the entire country. Even though we have just 16 branches in Egypt, the customer as of today has 900 places to go and sign their papers. The progression in numbers of customers acquired is great — we had 25k customers join just through a limited referral campaign we launched, and mns of customers viewed and interacted with our Visa ad campaign featuring Mohamed Salah.

The Central Bank of Egypt is also promoting financial inclusion through a series of events, so we’re opening our own booth at those events where people can come and be onboarded and activate their accounts on the spot.

E: What’s in the pipeline for Mashreq Neo in Egypt for the rest of the year? Any new services you plan to introduce?

R: We have a very busy roadmap for the tail-end of the year and for the beginning of next year. We have already started to offer fixed deposits, and we’re planning on launching new savings products and more lending options.

In terms of the app, we have upgraded it and it is now on the same stack in Egypt and in the UAE.

E: Are you facing any challenges in terms of transferring the tech from the UAE to Egypt and getting customers onboarded properly?

R: There are slight differences between the UAE and Egypt. First of all, the quality of phones is a bit different and that can cause some glitches when they take a picture of their ID, to give you an example.

Then there’s the lack of eKYC based on facial recognition, which is something that still has to be developed in Egypt. I know the regulator is working on it and we expect it to be available sooner rather than later.

E: What else is different in terms of the offering?

R: The UAE is an expat country and there is a lot of need and a lot of journeys being built to offer ways for customers to send money home. In Egypt, it’s the other way around. It’s very important for people to be able to receive the money in their accounts. And I think here, Neo can play a very strong role in terms of financial inclusion. The money can land in their account extremely fast — that’s their priority.

Ultimately, we want to create an integrated view and seamless connectivity between Mashreq across different countries. And again, this should help in supporting the remittances towards Egypt and countries that need it.

I think that’s an interesting direction that we’re going to see as we transform into a group. We’re open in Egypt, we are going to open in Pakistan, and we plan to open in GCC countries. Then the customer will expect to have a global view. If I have an account in Mashreq Egypt and another in Mashreq UAE, I would expect to see it in the same app and to be able to seamlessly transfer money between them.

The good news is because we’re a group, there are solutions we’re building in Pakistan — where we plan to launch — which we are going to use for Egypt or even for the UAE, and vice versa. There is cross pollination across countries, which works both ways — not only exporting solutions from the UAE and applying it in other markets to help boost financial inclusion, but also learning from those other markets.

E: What was the biggest challenge you’ve had to overcome since joining Mashreq and heading Neo?

My focus has been on increasing client engagement. What most banks do is they cherry pick the best customers, targeting maybe just the top 200k out of 1 mn customers for loans, investments, deposits, ins., etc. What we have done, and it’s working very well, is we put together a client engagement team, which looks at the whole customer base and is finding ways to engage the customer based on their profile and their needs. There might be a blue collar worker who doesn’t have money to invest, or is not interested in investment — perhaps for this client, what’s most relevant is remittances.

We are building very advanced machine learning models, which are helping us analyze and go through our databases, and personalize all this engagement.

E: You’ve mentioned a lot of investments in AI in earlier chats. Where are you focusing those investments currently?

I think the most obvious area in which genAI is used today is in the chatbot and the customer service center. What I’m seeing in terms of penetration of the chatbot is very encouraging; more and more customers are using the chatbot, and more and more of their requests are resolved end-to-end through the chatbot. It’s improving the efficiency of our operations, but it also helps boost customer satisfaction.

We also use AI to optimize the funnel, so we’re collecting data from the moment the customer downloads the app until they open an account, and this data is very important for us to understand where friction points are and then to try to sort those out.

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