Combining Islamic financial principles with AI-native technology to build a new financial model
AI is creating an opportunity to rethink financial services around the customer, moving beyond traditional digital banking towards platforms that can better understand individual needs, bring financial services together and help customers make more informed decisions about their money, according to Abdallah Abu-Sheikh, Founder and CEO, Mal.
Unlike traditional digital banking, where customers still navigate individual products, processes and channels themselves, AI makes it possible to understand their needs across different interactions and connect more of their financial lives through one experience.
For Abu-Sheikh, unlocking that opportunity requires more than adding AI features to existing banking services. It means building financial platforms around AI from the ground up, so that intelligence is embedded in how the platform operates, how products work together and how customers manage their money.
Reimagining financial services
This thinking led Abu-Sheikh to establish Mal, the world’s first AI-native Islamic digital financial platform, created to reimagine financial services for a new generation of globally connected individuals and businesses.
Founded in Abu Dhabi, Mal is backed by a US$ 230mn seed funding round, the largest publicly announced fintech seed investment in the Middle East and Africa, and received in-principle approval from the Central Bank of the UAE in May 2026 to establish a licensed bank.
At the heart of Mal is a different approach to how financial services are built. AI has been embedded across its core architecture, operating model and products from day one, rather than added later as a feature, enabling Mal to bring experiences that have traditionally been fragmented across different providers into one intelligent platform.
By bringing financial services, AI and Islamic financial principles together in one connected experience, Mal enables individuals and businesses to manage more of their financial lives in one place — from earning and spending to financing, investing, saving and growing their wealth.
AI powered banking
“AI should not sit on top of banking; it should change how banking works. When AI is built into the foundation, it can understand what customers need, connect what used to be fragmented, and turn processes that took days or weeks into minutes or seconds,” asserted Abu Sheikh.
Abu-Sheikh believes Islamic finance has an opportunity to reach a much broader global audience when its principles are combined with technology and delivered through an experience designed around the expectations of customers today.
Rather than viewing Islamic finance simply as a set of requirements applied to individual products, he sees its principles as informing how financial services are designed, how customers are treated and how financial institutions approach areas such as pricing, financing, risk and the protection and growth of wealth.
