IBS Journal July 2017
41
a legacy organisation. That’s the reason why we wanted to build Clearly, and we recruited people with the same philosophy.
How long has Clearly been in the works?
Clearly has been in the works for probably two years now. From being sat on a beach in Malibu asking myself “what would it be like? Who would we serve?”, to me starting working on it full time officially just over a year ago. That was me following my conviction with courage, after leaving an extremely well-paid job and spending nearly every penny I had and then raising money from other people to do it. We incorporated locally [in Dubai] about nine months ago, and we’ve been building the team from the ground up, investing in the technology and likes of that.
What is the road ahead, and when do you think the integration will take place?
We expect to launch in Q2 next year. Our whole model is predicated on a partner bank, so we’re a full neo bank, but we leverage the license and the balance sheets from a partner bank. That means that there is some integration with those partner banks, and that’s pretty much what takes most of the time. We’re in the final stages of advanced due diligence with a number of banks that are courting us, and we’ll make a decision in the course of the next 12 weeks about which bank to partner with. Then we
will start the whole integration. Would you ever pursue a full license?
I don’t really want a full license, to be frank. I think there are enough licensed banks in the market, so that’s not what is needed here. This is a different experience. Many UK challenger banks can’t grow at the same pace as our model because their investors need to have really deep pockets to keep pumping out regulatory capital. I don’t want to be constrained by that. If we partner with a very well capitalised bank, that believes they can get better returns by partnering with us, then they’ll deploy it this way. It just makes more sense. Why the UAE?
I wanted to build it in the UAE, because while the market here is overbanked, it is woefully underserved. There are 50 banks here, and four banks own 50% of the market. It is a really opportune time to launch. Most of the time, when banks think to go digital, they’re like “oh well, I have a mobile app”. When they think they are at the forefront of digital, they repackage what they’ve got, put a new brand on it and market it for millennials, but they don’t change anything behind the scenes, or the customer journey that much. It is difficult to do it for them due to the legacy infrastructure, but we saw a great opportunity for us. Plus, having been in this region for almost a decade, I knew this market better than anybody.
We have been approached by banks in the US, Saudi Arabia and even Malaysia. It’s hugely exciting, but you’ve
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