The UAE has unique financial needs. As the country opens the floodgates for everyday retail use of its new dirham-backed stablecoins, the traditional boundaries of personal finance are rapidly dissolving.
The emirates’ drive for innovation is motivated by a massive expatriate population. Managing wealth across multiple borders has historically meant juggling fragmented bank accounts, high remittance fees, and delayed settlements. Now, a new wave of WealthTech is leveraging a powerful technological synergy to solve this problem: blockchain as the seamless “movement layer” and artificial intelligence as the “intelligence layer.”
In an exclusive interview, Stephen Ong, Co-Founder of Vault22, breaks down how this dual-engine approach is turning the UAE into the global blueprint for regulated, proactive, and unified digital wealth management.
Tara is built to move financial guidance from generic rules of thumb to advice based on someone’s entire financial life. What does that actually change for how a person invests or trades, compared to what they’d get from a single bank or broker looking at just one account?
The biggest difference is context. Most financial institutions only see the products you hold with them, so naturally their advice is limited to that narrow view. They may recommend an investment without understanding your mortgage, your cash flow, your pension overseas, your emergency savings or even your spending habits.
Tara was built to understand your complete financial picture. By securely connecting your accounts, liabilities, investments, spending habits, insurance coverage and financial goals, it can recognise how one decision affects everything else in your financial life.
For example, if someone receives a bonus, a traditional platform might encourage them to invest it. Tara may determine that paying down high-interest debt, increasing emergency savings or topping up a retirement account is actually the decision most likely to improve their long-term wealth.
The objective isn’t to help people make more trades. It’s to help them make better financial decisions. Research consistently shows that long-term financial outcomes are driven far more by behaviour and consistency than by trying to pick the next winning investment. That’s exactly where we believe our approach has the most impact.
The UAE’s dirham-backed stablecoin has been cleared for everyday retail use through licensed exchanges, not just institutional settlement. From where you sit in wealthtech, how do you expect that to change the way ordinary people in the UAE save, spend, or invest?
For a country like the UAE, with such a large expatriate population, regulated dirham stablecoins have the potential to make everyday financial life significantly more efficient.
Cross-border transfers which are still expensive in UAE become faster and cheaper, people can move money between countries more seamlessly, and settlement becomes almost instantaneous rather than taking days, or hours in the case of the UAE.
For wealth platforms, that means reducing friction and offering better value to the customer. For the ‘ordinary people’ in the UAE most of which are from abroad, they usually have monthly cross border payments such as remitting money back to family in their home country which can all happen in real time with lower costs and better value to the customer.
You’ve talked about how fragmented a typical expat’s finances are here, savings in one country, a pension in another, investments in the UAE. How do AI and blockchain actually work together to fix that, faster transfers without giving up safety, rather than trading one for the other?
There are many different applications for these technologies. In the wealth of personal finance and wealth, Blockchain improves how money moves. It enables faster settlement, lower transaction costs and greater transparency when transferring assets between institutions or countries.
AI improves how decisions are made. It takes information from across someone’s financial life and turns it into personalised guidance that helps them achieve their goals.
For an expat, that could mean having pensions in the UK, investments in the UAE, property in South Africa and family commitments elsewhere.
AI can understand all of those moving parts and recommend the optimal financial actions, while blockchain increasingly provides the infrastructure that allows money and assets to move efficiently between them.
One is the intelligence layer. The other is the movement layer. Together they can create a much more seamless financial experience without compromising security or regulatory oversight.
You’ve stressed that security basics, like strong passwords and multi-factor authentication, are still underrated in fintech. As stablecoins and blockchain rails move from institutional settlement into everyday consumer transactions, what new risks does that open up, and how is AI actually being used to catch fraud before it happens rather than after?
I see the technology itself is becoming increasingly secure. The bigger risk remains the human element, and bad-actors in the space.
As digital assets become more mainstream, fraudsters will increasingly target people rather than the blockchain itself through phishing, social engineering, fake investment opportunities and account takeovers.
That’s where AI becomes comes into play. Instead of only looking for suspicious transactions after they occur, modern AI systems can continuously analyse behavioural patterns. They can recognise when someone suddenly logs in from an unusual location, attempts transactions that don’t fit their historical behaviour or interacts with scams that match known fraud patterns.
At Vault22 we focus on the AI to help our user make the best financial decisions and integrate with robust enterprise-grade partners ensuring security throughout our systems and workflows.
Being a regulated entity serving bank customers we always maintain the latest security standards for Enterprise, maintain the highest level of security, ensure our staff are well trained and regularly test our systems for potential weaknesses.
Fast-forward three to five years: what does AI-powered wealthTech running on blockchain rails actually look like for someone living in the UAE? And what’s the biggest thing, regulatory or technical, standing between now and that picture?
I think financial apps will become far more proactive than they are today.
Rather than expecting people to constantly check balances, compare products or manually plan their finances, AI will quietly monitor their financial lives in the background. It will recognise opportunities to save money, optimise debt, improve investment outcomes or avoid unnecessary costs before the user even realises there’s a decision to make.
Blockchain will increasingly disappear into the background as the infrastructure that enables instant settlement, programmable payments and seamless movement of assets between banks, investment platforms and countries.
The experience won’t feel like using separate banking, investing and payments apps. It will feel like having one intelligent financial companion helping you make better decisions across every aspect of your financial life.
The biggest challenge isn’t actually the technology. AI and blockchain are advancing remarkably quickly. The bigger challenge is maintaining trust between consumers, financial institutions and regulators as new technologies emerge, get tested, rolled out, and the regulation to define best practice. That means clear governance, explainable AI, robust consumer protection and common standards for digital identity and interoperability.
The UAE has positioned itself extremely well in this regard. Its willingness to embrace innovation while maintaining strong regulatory oversight makes it one of the most exciting markets globally for building the next generation of wealth technology.
