When Baraa Koshak launched Abwab AI three years ago, his aim wasn’t to build another lender, it was to solve the deeper, structural problem holding back SME finance across the Middle East: inefficient underwriting.
In a conversation with Mark Walker at The Fintech Times at the Dubai Fintech Summit this month, CEO Koshak explained: “It’s not the lack of capital, especially in the region. We’re thankful enough to have the government support and the amount of capital that is targeting these SMEs. But the issue then becomes an operational issue.”
Abwab AI, headquartered in Riyadh, automates SME underwriting by using machine learning and transaction data to assess creditworthiness, turning what is often a multi-week manual process into an instant decision.
“If you really drill into it, on average now in the market, it’s taking four to eight weeks to respond to an application of an SME, if they should get financing or not,” he said. “Why? Because fundamentally, it’s a very manual process.”
From Revolut to Riyadh
Koshak’s journey to Abwab AI began with hands-on experience in fintech. “I founded the first licensed fintech in Saudi… and I was the chief product officer there. I took it from no licence, no product, to half a million individual customers, 80,000 business accounts,” he said.
That success caught the attention of Revolut, where he was recruited to help expand the platform to 12 countries.
During his time there, he also worked on “optimising the performance of the machine learning models that extract behavioural insights from transactional data”, he revealed. It was this experience that helped him identify a major opportunity in the Gulf: using cash-flow data to evaluate businesses without formal credit histories.
“When I took a closer look into the markets in the Middle East in general,” he said, “I realised it’s… the inefficiency in the process and the lack of insights that allows lenders to finance these SMEs with confidence… which is a pure technology play.”
Solving for local gaps
Saudi Arabia’s lending ecosystem is evolving fast, but many small businesses still fall through the cracks. Traditional credit signals, like audited financials and bureau reports, are often unavailable or outdated.
“For micro and small businesses, they’re either unaudited or they’re delayed six to eight months,” said Koshak. “Credit bureau data gives you a history of their credit exposure, but the business didn’t really get the credit before. They don’t have a record for it.”
Abwab addresses this gap by generating “alternative cash-based credit signals”. The goal is to enable banks and fintechs to confidently lend to SMEs that would otherwise be excluded.
So far, it’s working. Since coming out of stealth six months ago, Abwab AI has helped process over $400million in SME loans. “It’s been a lot of sleepless nights,” Koshak admitted.
Regional expansion and global ambition
From a base in Saudi Arabia, Abwab AI is now expanding into Egypt, the UAE and the UK. “We’ve started in Egypt and UAE and recently in the UK,” Koshak said. “We’re seeing the pain point quite similar, but quite variant in every different region.”
Each market poses unique challenges. In the UAE, he noted, “there’s a big issue of skip rate, where people come, open businesses and then bounce.” In the UK, meanwhile, “the data is much more available… but the process is still pretty manual within most financial institutions.”
So why expand into a developed market like the UK? “Thirty per cent of all SME financing there is from fintechs,” Koshak explained. “Around 10 to 20 per cent of these fintechs actually have built the full underwriting technology that is fully automated, and the rest are still not there yet.”
The company’s model is a B2B2C play: enabling financial institutions to scale faster, and, increasingly, helping them find clients too. “We got these lenders on board, and then the lenders are asking for more… we started integrating with basically platforms like Sell and the likes to link their client base to the lenders that we work with.”
In Egypt, where the market is large but volatile, Koshak sees both a challenge and a major opportunity. “With what’s happening with the currency lately… interest rates are really spiking. But still, the market needs to survive… especially these SMEs, they want to keep on going.”
A scalable solution with local customisation
Despite the differences across regions, the core platform remains the same. “If you’re selling a SaaS solution… it should work across regions,” said Koshak. “There is a bit of personalisation, customisation, but most of the personalisation is actually in the sales journey, not in the product itself.”
To maintain quality, Abwab’s machine learning models are trained on varied data from across markets. “Bank statements are structured differently in the UAE and Saudi and Egypt,” he said. “So are we able to produce the same level of credit signals across these different markets or not?”
That’s one reason the company is deliberately pushing into multiple markets early: to ensure the robustness of its technology. “If we limit ourselves to one market now, then we risk basically being super tailor focused.”
Staying infrastructure-only
Abwab AI has no plans to become a lender itself. “We still think, from what we’re seeing in the market, the issue is not capital,” said Koshak. “There is a lot of interest from BlackRock, JP Morgan, private credit funds that want to deploy in the region.”
Instead, he sees Abwab’s role as “that infrastructure player” that makes it viable for capital to reach SMEs, without becoming a financial institution itself. “We can enable that capital to reach actually these SMEs without necessarily being the direct originators in the market.”
Moving forward
Attending his first Dubai Fintech Summit, Koshak was upbeat about the connections being made. “We have a target in the team. We want to get at least three POCs out of this,” he said. “Pretty stoked about it and we think we can get it up and running.”
Abwab AI is one of several fintechs in the Gulf looking to make SME lending faster and more accessible – not by competing with banks, but by helping them make smarter, quicker decisions. In a region where small businesses are the backbone of the economy yet often struggle to access credit the right technology can make a meaningful difference.
As Koshak summed it up: “If we automate the whole process, then the decision – it can be instant.”
