As we push deeper by the hour into 2025, we look back on a year of growth, innovation, and resilience at Mashreq. We expanded our presence within the region with our launch of Mashreq Neo in Egypt earlier in the year — and laid the foundation stones for further expansion in our region and beyond. This week, we are in Muscat to announce the opening of Mashreq Oman. In Pakistan, Mashreq became the first bank to launch pilot operations as a Digital Retail Bank. And our footprint will grow by at least one other country later this year.

From Dubai and Abu Dhabi, to Cairo, London, New York, Hong Kong, and India, Mashreq helps ambitious businesses and individual clients capture opportunity and take charge of their financial futures. We do not do that just by being present, but through innovative products including our NEO CORP digital corporate banking proposition for corporate clients, which we rolled out in Qatar, Bahrain, and Kuwait, and are preparing to roll out across the globe. Last year, we upgraded and consolidated our app to create a unified platform for clients to access all the financial services and information they need. Our focus remains on digital transformation, operational resilience, and client-centricity. The record activations on NEO BIZ highlight our leadership in business banking.

Mashreq has always been more than just a bank. We’re a rapidly growing digital disruptor and a platform that prioritizes sustainability and innovation, which is why as we expanded our digital footprint globally this past year, we also expanded our sustainability initiative, Climb2Change. As part of this global initiative, our team we scaled and cleaned five of the highest peaks and one base camp in Nepal that underscored the resilience of the human spirit. We further expanded into Pakistan, where our team helped clean up nearly 1.727 tons of waste at mountain sites including K2, Broad Peak base camp, Concordia, Goro II; the expedition directly benefited 47 local businesses and over 100 community members. We recently celebrated one year of this global mission with the successful completion of our Egypt clean-up expedition at Wadi Degla Protectorate, a natural reserve near Cairo, where we removed 2.182 tonnes of general waste and 120 tonnes of construction waste. As the initiative continues to gain momentum and expand, we look to target iconic peaks and ecosystems in Tibet (China), and beyond.

We also built on our track record as a provider of sustainability-linked facilities in the region, including unique transactions we structured for born in-the-UAE education platform Gems Education and another for Qatar’s Landmark Retail, marking the first time a private sector company has signed a bilateral sustainability-linked loan in Qatar.

As we step into 2025, we remain as excited and committed as ever to deliver value to our shareholders and customers through impactful initiatives and digital transformation. The region we are in is seeing tremendous growth, and the UAE is at the forefront, with a booming non-oil economy and tourism sector, and an ever-growing population.

To adapt to this rapidly growing — and changing — landscape, a rethinking of the nature of traditional banking is essential. It is not enough to claim to be customer-centric; banks must truly become a one-stop shop for customers’ financing needs, and that means giving customers the agency to control and manage their finances in the most seamless ways possible. Open finance is coming, and the only way forward is to build towards an integrated ecosystem that puts the client front and center and prioritizes customer relationships.

Mashreq will be at the forefront of these changes, capturing the opportunities they bring us with innovation, agility, and resilience. We look forward to talking with all of you about how we can help you do the same in 2025.

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