Ala Aljayyusi, managing director at CBIx: Each week, My Morning Routine looks at how a successful member of the business community starts their day — and then throws in a couple of business questions for fun. Speaking to us this week is Ala Aljayyusi (LinkedIn), managing director at CBIx. Edited excerpts from our conversation below.

I’ve been a banker for most of my life, though I prefer to call myself now a financial services provider, because what I do is not limited to just banking anymore. I’m very fond of financial markets in general. I like how money moves. I went to business school — contrary to what my parents wanted at the time — and as soon as I finished, after getting graduation training in Jordan Ahli Bank, I came to Dubai.

I worked on mortgages and home finance in 2005 as a product development manager at Tamweel, which was a subsidiary of Dubai Islamic Bank. I later moved to sales, then to Barclays doing mortgages again, and then to an investment company, which is where I was exposed to direct investments and equity shares and that side of finance. I then moved to Saudi Arabia for six years to work with Deutsche Bank, before coming back to Dubai to work at DIFC for a couple of years, and landed at CBI after that.

When I joined, our CEO had just taken over and the bank was going through a housekeeping overhaul. The number of branches was significantly reduced, from 28 to 8, and there was a plan to focus purely on corporate banking. I joined in 2020, so we, along with the rest of the world, had to work against the odds. Despite the fact that this phase passed and we remained profitable, it was an eye-opener in terms of how behind we were innovation-wise.

We realized that if we want to do things better, faster, and cheaper, we need to innovate. We found the best approach for a bank of our size is not to build from scratch, but to partner with the people who are already doing it. We started going to fintech hubs like DIFC, Hub71, Kazakhstan, and Silicon Valley to learn more about the innovations happening across the world. This is how we started finding technologies that are useful not only for the bank, but for the wider financial services industry across the UAE and GCC. We started directly investing in those companies, and that’s how the corporate venture arm of CBIx came to be.

The bank was very busy at the time and decisions like these took time, so we decided to offload the responsibility to CBIx, and add fresh blood and fresh ideas through an innovation lab and corporate venture capital arm. It was a good chance to find alternative revenues for the bank, and to diversify beyond just financial services. We invested in companies that do things ranging from carbon credits, to holographics, to AI-enabled credit scoring.

For upcoming investments, I’m really interested in the wealth that will exchange hands in the next five to ten years, and understanding the priorities of Gen Alpha, which are already doing things completely differently. They don’t want a relationship manager to call and update them, they want everything to be a click away. They’re also not interested in traditional assets like real estate or your typical S&P 500 fund. I think AI will play a huge role in their wealth management journeys and in helping investment managers define the right investments for this generation.

I sleep very early, and wake up at 5am with my kids, and when they’re off school, I’m off to the office. I usually start by catching up on my emails just on my phone before even getting to the office, and leave the bigger stuff for the office.

We’ll be getting our own premises with different hours and policies to the bank, but for now, we follow their hours and their half-day policy on Fridays. That makes Friday my day for meetings. I’m usually in DIFC, meeting people for coffee and casual chats. From Monday to Thursday, the schedule can change every day. We’re in the building phase now, so every week is different to the next.

Our CEO does not micromanage, so we tend to follow that approach. We operate in isolation from the bank, and try to act more like a startup, while still benefitting from the bank’s capabilities and the strong policies they do have.

Every day I make sure I catch up on my podcasts. On all my drives, I listen to podcasts, not music. I really enjoy The Diary of a CEO, and I like some episodes of ABTalks, like the one with Mo Gawdat, for example. I also like it because it’s mostly in Arabic, and since my children don’t speak much Arabic, it’s a good way to get them familiarized while they’re with me in the car.

I also read a lot, but on the plane usually, or when I take my son to football or my daughter to gymnastics. Good to Great is my favorite. Thinking, Fast and Slow is another really good one. Currently, I’m reading about private equity; it’s a book called Business Adventures, which is a collection of stories — the most recent one is from 2005, so it’s pretty old — but it shows you that the way we operate as human beings is always the same.

In a few years, I want us to have established a direct SME finance company alongside the right partner, and for it to be very active. By that I mean, AED 500-600 mn in financing every month. In micro-loans terms, that’s a lot of transactions. I also want us to continue investing in companies and supporting entrepreneurs in the region through partnerships with accelerators. We’re already in a partnership now with UC Berkeley for their accelerator, and we have a separate one with an accelerator in Central Asia called Al Farabi. We can later — say, in five years — offer up a portfolio of companies to our VIP clients to invest in as a product for high net worth individuals.

There’s a quote that I really like and I think sums up the concept of innovation for me. The quote is from Henry Ford, who said “if I ask people what they want, they would have said faster horses.” We don’t know what we need until someone puts it in front of us. We never knew we would rely so much on Uber or on emails, but look at us now.

The advice that I received and has stuck with me for more than 20 years came when I was moving from product development to sales, and I really didn’t want to make the move. My manager told me, “If someone gives you an opportunity, take it — and learn later.” I realized its relevance again when I moved to Riyadh, and I was reluctant at first, but I ended up learning a lot there.

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