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The world's first modern bank opened over 600 years ago in Italy, when Banco di San Giorgio pioneered the current account. For the next five centuries, the way customers accessed their money barely changed - you went to the bank. Then, in 1994, a credit union in California let people check their balance over the internet, and the "internet banking" revolution began.
The upcoming revolution is going to be a much bigger one, and it's already underway. It's powered by AI, and here is the part most people outside the region still don't fully register: the adoption is happening here, in the UAE, faster than most places on earth. Silicon Valley leads the world in frontier model innovation. But no government has leaned into AI the way the UAE has. Abu Dhabi is on track to become the world's first fully AI-native government by 20271. Stargate UAE, one of the largest hyperscale AI data centers in the world2, is being built right now by G42 (one of Alaan’s customers), alongside OpenAI and others, and is expected to provide computing for up to half of the world's population.
Today, we're announcing one of the world's first AI-native business bank accounts, powered by ruya. Homegrown in the UAE, built for UAE businesses.
Right now, the finance tools feel like they are held together with duct tape. Approvals live in one place, or worse, on WhatsApp or phone calls. Payments happen somewhere else, in the bank account. Accounting happens in a third system that barely talks to the first two. Finance teams spend their days doing the least valuable work imaginable: chasing approvals, reconciling, closing books manually, a week or two after the month has already ended. Smart people, mind-numbing work.
AI is going to change how finance workflows get done, completely and rapidly. A bank account is in the center of that workflow. That's what we have built from the ground up. Alaan's AI-native bank account folds all three workflows, approvals, payments, and accounting, into one, with intelligence baked into every step instead of bolted on at the end.
