Fardan criticizes banks and investment funds for slow transfers and reduced boldness that hinder capital flow

I see in the blunt statement offered by Mohammed Ibrahim Al-Fardan, head of the Al-Fardan Holding Group, an explicit challenge that places the traditional financial system and regional venture-capital networks before a mirror revealing the depth of structural imbalances that the capital flow is experiencing. This stance stems from a family experience that spans more than a century, which shifted from diving and pearl trading in Bahrain to a conglomerate encompassing more than fifty projects across real-estate, automotive, hospitality, fintech, extending to artificial intelligence, space technology and crypto digital assets.Settling into comfort zones represents the real danger that threatens business sustainability in the region.And not merely the geopolitical tensions that some institutions have become accustomed to slowing down over, especially since the banking sector has not changed fundamentally since the 2008 crisis, which forecast a need to restructure the global financial system without an early response from shareholders.

The crisis of the existing financial system manifests in the lost operational efficiency of money transfers, as sending corporate payments between the UAE and Europe or the United States takes at least three days, while regional transfers between the UAE and Saudi Arabia stretch to entire weeks because of persistent settlement-path problems. This shocking slowness exposes a critical technological and banking gap, especially when traditional banks react to client dissatisfaction with unjustified astonishment. Although fintech firms such as Revolut and regional currency-exchange shops have managed to address part of these issues and have built tangible profit margins, they too have fallen into the trap of comfort and have ceased delivering radical innovations that would redefine the corporate user experience and uproot bureaucracy at its roots.

The blunt criticism extends to the venture-capital scene, where investment activity in the Middle East fell to its lowest level in five years in the first half of this year, according to data from the Magnit platform, under the pressure of the Iran war and a waning appetite for risk. Yet Al-Fardan refuses to attribute the decline solely to the military and political factor, describing regional venture-capital funds as not exerting enough effort and lacking the seriousness and innovation required to steer the economy toward calculated risk-taking. This view rests on a historical trajectory he launched in 2007, after prior experience at IBM and Microsoft, which constitutes the region’s first venture-capital firm to capture distressed assets and invest in start-ups when most capital was withdrawing.

In contrast to the funds’ conservatism and banks’ inertia, crypto emerges as the largest untapped investment opportunity, receiving support and direction from major global leaders and institutions, backed by the regulatory frameworks and infrastructure that the UAE has established for the blockchain ecosystem. The Al-Fardan Holding portfolio moves in this space through stablecoins and tokenization of real-world assets, including real estate, new foundational projects and financial bonds. Despite this optimism, the volatility of these markets remains a genuine source of caution that demands superior skill, akin to swimming among whales in open waters, where abstaining from investment becomes a prudent choice for those lacking high-level risk-management tools and a understanding of its violent fluctuations.

These facts have direct implications for the operational and investment decisions of anyone running a start-up or leading a treasury in the Gulf, Egypt or the Levant. The continued slowness of financial transfers among major economic hubs forces a recalculation of cash-flow cycles and the cost of holding working capital, raising the risk of operational default when relying solely on traditional banking channels. Likewise, the waning momentum of investment funds compels the adoption of business models that depend on actual revenues and generate self-sustaining cash flows instead of relying on external financing rounds. At the same time, this environment opens a broad competitive window for fintech developers and digital tokenization to devise instantaneous settlement solutions that breach the comfort zones where banks and existing wallets have settled, and redirect liquidity toward measurable operational solutions.