YAP – UAE’s First Independent Digital Banking Platform Launches

Dubai-based company; YAP made its presence across the UAE creating history by being the first independent digital banking platform.  Digital banking has been in practice across the globe and has been used widely all around. Though late, UAE got its digital banking platform.  YAP does not have any sort of license of its own; it has partnered with RAK Bank for their business operation.  It does not have any physical branches and does not offer basic banking services like loans and mortgages but only focuses on basic digital banking features.

Customers of YAP can track their spending and budgeting analysis. They can keep track of how much they have been spending on shopping, transport and food on a monthly basis and generate their monthly report from this platform. They can keep track of real-time transaction notifications as YAP will inform about every purchase, withdrawal and transfer on the spot itself.

Customers can manage their card usage and set a limit on their own and should not make any call to the call center for this type of task.  They can make peer-to-peer payments through the use of this application. Further customers can make payments of their utility bills of Airways, or taxi; they can make payment to groceries from the application itself. Finally, customers can obtain remittance service.

Before this, few UAE-based banks had their digital banking platforms targeted to digitally savvy young customers.  There were not any such independent platforms. CEO and founder of YAP, Marwan Hachem stated that the Fintech revolution had turned out to become pretty popular in other parts of the world, and they had a gap. This sort of service was highly needed in the Middle East.

Head of Product, Katral-Nada Hassan elaborated that there had been challenges for fintech who had been looking up for expansion as well. She further explained that there exist various fintech companies looking for partnering with banks, but that would require a lot of discussions, relationship building tasks and is a tedious task.

Hassan further explained that YAP is in the process of partnering with banks in other countries like Saudi, Ghana and Pakistan for expansion over the business.