Masahiro Takasaki, the CEO of Doreming US. and Doreming UK.  was participating in Islamic Finance Innovation Day being held in Bahrain on 7th December 2017.

The event was held in partnership with the Bahrain Economic Development Board (EDB), with support from industry partners including the Responsible Finance and Investment Foundation (RFI).

The forum focused on Islamic fintech and comprised of two moderated roundtables: “Islamic Fintech – Adopting an Innovation Agenda” and “Human Capital Development: Supporting Sustain Growth and Fintech Innovation.” Each roundtable discussed various topics including the important role of Sharia and other regulations in the drive for innovation and further industry advancement.

~ Event Report ~
Masahiro Takasaki, CEO of Doreming.Ltd and Doreming, Inc.
7th December 2017 Thu. 8 am at Capital Club Bahrain
In the introduction of the Bahrain central bank, I participated in "Islamic Finance Innovation Day" held annually by the Bahrain Economic Development Board (EDB).
At this year's forum, a roundtable was conducted on "Islamic Fintech" and "FinTech Human Resources Development".
The following 5 topics are which I was interested in.

  1. To target the Saudi Arabian market, Saudi Arabian banks (e.g. Gulf International Bank) and FinTech companies (e.g. Paytabs, Now Money) also made tests in the Bahrain market and made a record, then went or will go into Saudi Arabian market.
    • Bahrain sets "to become a Finetec hub in the Middle East and Africa" as a national strategy.
    • In 2017, Bahrain Central Bank launched an organization specialized in FinTech. They established "regulatory sandbox" which promotes innovative FinTech business and promotes competition by adopting deregulation measures to temporarily stop the regulation of current law. They are very supportive of Fintech companies activities such as an acquisition of licenses.
    • In comparison, the central bank of Saudi Arabia is still more conservative and takes more time and money. If they can show the achievements in Bahrain, the talk proceeds more smoothly.
  2. In any country, mobile payment is not spread more than we expected. In Kenya, M-Pesa's mobile settlement has become so widespread that some stores want to accept payment via M-Pesa instead of cash, and the platform of Doreming has the possibility of becoming such infrastructure depending on the ingenuity.
    • For Kenya, handling at M-Pesa is easier to manage than cash handling, and leading to cost reduction. Also, they do not need to worry about cash theft. In addition to those factors, Doreming also makes effective use as a marketing tool for shops by making full use of personnel, shift data, position data, etc.
    • Convenience is also important for disseminating mobile / digital payment, but it is the most important key to how to give "security and trust" more than that.
    • Presence threats to banks will become companies that have many users, such as Amazon and Careem (Middle Eastern Uber), that incorporate financial services into the user's daily platform. Because there are more accesses than the bank site, and the user experience is superior to banks.
    • For the central bank, how to use the cabinet savings (activation of money flow activation) to revitalize the economy is an important task. As Doreming enables workers to access their earned salaries as soon as they finish working, this problem could also be dealt with.
    • The opinion that was most frequent about Japanese FinTech is that Japan has interesting FinTech services but only for Japan and completed in the domestic market. Currently, the biggest barriers are culture and language. However, in younger generations, more Japanese speak English, they are familiar with SNS and technology on a daily basis, adaptability to different cultures, so the number of success stories abroad will increase in the future.

Facts

  • Like in Japan, the Middle East is also very lagging behind FinTech. In global terms, Fintech has invested $500 billion in five years from 2010, whereas in the Middle East only $100 million has been invested in the Middle East.
  • In the US, banks have invested $3.6 billion on FinTech, whereas in the Middle East there are few such cases.
  • Not only in the Middle East but also globally, there is a total of $2 trillion of the capital gaps of small and medium enterprises.

They were also interested in Doreming business model.