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got to fight these guys off. Focus is very important. I’d love to be able to do everything at once, but if I do that I won’t create a different way of banking as best as I can. That will be compromised. Let’s get it right, let’s get it perfect. And then we will move onto different markets and expand from that.


And of course, it’s also about the ubiquity of mobile phones in the UAE: when Blackberry was still prominent, the average number of mobile phones per capita was about 2.2. You pretty much knew that there were people who had an Android, an iPhone and a Blackberry. Even now that Blackberry


has fallen out of the market, it’s still over 2 per capita. It’s all high-end here, except perhaps in the blue-collar kind of work. Although you still see those guys with cheaper smartphones. The infrastructure is 100% in place here. The UAE has got one of the highest internet penetration rates in the world.


Dubai is a place where the sheikh ruler dreams something and makes it happen – anything is possible. There is such a melting pot of culture and nationalities, but if you can make something work for everybody here, despite it being difficult, you can pretty much make it work anywhere. If we launch Clearly in the UAE and it’s a success, we intend to take it anywhere we can.


The regulators are really getting hot on this. If you look at the two main offshore regulators, the DIFC and the ADGM, they’re really pushing it. It’s all fintech, fintech, fintech; digital, digital, digital. The crown princes are talking about getting behind tech start-ups, and making Dubai the centre. That momentum is building. It is a difficult market, but it will absolutely get easier. Based on the primary research that we have done and that I used to have access to, everybody wants and is desperate for something new here. However, everybody is copying the main banks, which are going digital and targeting millennials. It’s the “me too” mentality. But not us – if they go right, well, we’ll go left.


Have you encountered any challenges in the region?


When you look at onboarding customers, the current regulation says that a bank representative has to have physical size of the original KYC documentation. That means that when you open our account online, and they deliver your welcome kit with your debit card in, that agent has to look at your original KYC documentation and authenticate


it. That’s the way that it is now, which is not very elegant in my opinion. The solutions we’re seeing use different fintech partners. Not one of the couriers are really trained to identify whether the seven security issues of a Nigerian passport have been tampered with.


Our technology checks all of that. It does proper biometric matching, and it goes further than that. If it’s a UK passport, for example, we can connect to UK government databases. We actually see how digital reduces AML and KYC risk and fraud. The good news is that regulators are starting to see this as well, so we expect by the end of this year for that kind of physical sighting not to be mandatory anymore. We’re designing all of our customer journeys with a view that we will be able to do these types of things. We’re trying to future-proof and be ready.


What is the current state of the app?


We’ve launched the brand in the market, building awareness and getting customers preregistered. We’re engaging with these customers and we’re showing customers stuff as we go along to refine; we’re in version 3.0 of the app already. But we haven’t released to the customers for them to play with yet.


We’re fully compatible with Android and iOS. It’s mobile first, but it will be fully digital, and customers will have access to or platform via tablets or PC too.


What are your predictions and expectations regarding sign-ups?


I’m fully confident we will reach the number of customers we need, and more, logged in Y1, which is 9,000. It’s a relatively small portion, so we’re already ahead of that in preregistration. Being preregistered is different to converting it into an account, and we’re aware of that. We’ve set ourselves realistic goals, but we have been able to demonstrate that because of the cost of our operating model and our ability to cross-sell, and the likes, plus the fact that our sweet spot is in the affluence or mass affluence, not millennials, so we actually don’t need that many customers. They are only 20% of the population but they represent over half of the revenue goal. They have deep pocket shares, and they tend to buy a lot from you.


I understand James Greenwood, ex-CTO of Tandem, has joined the Clearly team. How has that been?


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