Bringing Financial Empowerment To The Masses

Ian Dillon, co-founder of smartphone banking concept NOW Money, explains how the company is helping potentially millions of low-income workers take control of their finances.

- Neil King

For the vast majority of people working in the GCC, salaries can be both vital and prohibitive at the same time.

Low-income migrant workers who earn under Dhs5,000 ($1,361) per month often rely on their wages to provide for their families either here in the region or in their home countries. But these same people – who make up an incredible 70 per cent of the working population – do not earn enough to be able to open a bank account. That’s certainly the case in the UAE where the magic figure of Dhs5,000 is a minimum salary requirement for bank account applications.

To put the quantity of people in more tangible terms, there are 4.5 million people in the UAE who cannot get a bank account due to their salaries – a figure that shoots up to 26 million people when you take into consideration the entire GCC.

Effectively being paid cash-in-hand, unable to manage or use their finances electronically, and at the mercy of exchange houses’ remittance rates, these millions of people have been forced to live outside the financial system, disenfranchised and disempowered. Until now.

Over the course of the past two years NOW Money has developed a platform to bank low-income migrant workers in the UAE, providing them with direct access to a current account, a debit card, a remittance marketplace, and other services. All from their smartphones.

Devised by Ian Dillon and Katherine Budd, NOW Money uses mobile banking technology to offer financial independence to those who were previously unable to open an account due to their salary levels.

“Both Katherine and I come from banking backgrounds – Katherine from the retail banking analytics side, and me from an investment banking side of things. And we both had independently come into contact with ‘challenger banks’ in the UK,” says Dillon as we meet to discuss the innovative business.