Arab Bank is this year’s Best Bank in the Middle East. CEO Randa Sadik shares how investments in technology and the next generation of clients spurred its growth.
Global Finance: What factors shaped Arab Bank’s results last year?
Randa Sadik: Arab Bank posted a robust performance in 2024, underpinned by broad growth across geographies and business segments. Our solid results were backed by a well-diversified expansion in core banking income with interest and non-interest revenue contributing to sustainable growth in net operating profit.
Arab Bank’s strategic emphasis on expanding beyond its home market continued to pay off, with strong momentum in the high-growth GCC region and international markets. Our global network and digital transformation were key in driving value across corporate, consumer, and wealth management banking segments.
The results underscore the effectiveness of our long-term strategy, which hinges on geographic and income stream diversification to ensure resilience and capture cross-market opportunities.
GF: What digitalization milestones did Arab Bank reach?
Sadik: We advanced our cloud-native applications and accelerated our API-driven development. AI agents will also boost this process by integrating more value-added services for our customers.
For our corporate business, we reengineered our credit origination and approval process to enable end-to-end digital flows that process new credit applications faster, starting in GCC countries. We also revamped our Trade Finance Corporate platform’s user interface and added new services.
We continued our focus on enhancing Arabi Next, our SME digital app, and, among many other things, launched digital onboarding for SME customers in Jordan – a major regional differentiator – alongside a new tailored digital loyalty program and an E2E SME cards management offering. We routed 91% of all SME transactions in Jordan through various digital channels.
Finally, the bank launched Omnify, a Banking as a Service [BaaS] platform. It lets companies embed Arab Bank APIs in their digital apps and enables the bank to leverage opportunities for new open banking regulatory frameworks.
GF: What is Arab Bank doing to reach the next generation of customers?
Sadik: We offer a well-rounded and fully integrated value proposition. We understand that young customers expect much more than traditional banking. They seek personalized, digital-first experiences that align with their dynamic lifestyles and evolving requirements.
Our youth-focused programs begin early. The Junior program starts by instilling financial awareness in children and evolves toward offering tailored banking experiences to teenagers. The Shabab program focuses on youth and young adults, helping them build a solid financial future via fee-free banking, exclusive lifestyle benefits, and a holistic financial proposition. The centerpiece of engagement with this key segment is our Arabi Mobile app, which delivers seamless, end-to-end digital journeys spanning onboarding, investments, and credit facilities.
Equally important is our dedication to sustainability. Through initiatives in financial literacy, continuous innovation, and environmental responsibility, we are staying relevant to younger generations and actively shaping a more inclusive and sustainable future.
GF: What role did AI play in your 2024 performance, and what will it contribute in 2025?
Sadik: Alongside our digital achievements, Arab Bank continued its ambition to become an AI-first organization, capitalizing on our rich data set to automate and personalize AI-based flows to assist our staff in their daily tasks and speed up their decisioning process, affording our customers both richer and more personalized customer engagement and autonomous drive.
By 2024, Arab Bank had over 20 AI-ML models in production covering a range of applications, from gaining better customer insights to improving our risk-based decision-and-detection process. Most of our models were developed internally under a robust governance framework. Still, we also injected third-party AI-based offerings, which let us benefit from the scale effect of market data, such as for customer service chatbots, cyber threats, and fraud alerts.
For 2025, we will continue to deploy these models while embedding generative-AI use cases to automate routine tasks, digitalize risk management, and enhance customer-facing personalized services. As a prerequisite, we provide Arab Bank staff with an effective learning and development program to capitalize on this new opportunity.
The most material examples include, but are not limited to, providing internal chatbots to front-line staff to access product and policy information faster, supporting their training needs, and allowing for a fast decision process
