BisB Appoints a Judging Panel for the Fintech Competition ‘BisB Innovation Challenge’

Bahrain Islamic Bank (BisB) recently announced the selection of its judging committee for the ‘BisB Innovation Challenge’ a Fintech Competition which is currently being run as part of the Bank’s partnership with the CBB Digital Lab “FinHub 973”, the Kingdom’s latest open application programming interface (API) innovation platform which will enable the testing and development of fintech solutions in order to deliver superior customer-centric digital capabilities.

The judging panel, which will convene on January 18th, 2021, to will Osama Nasr, Chief Information Officer of BisB, Yasmeen Al Sharaf, Head of Fintech and Innovation Unit at the Central Bank of Bahrain (CBB) and Wesam Baqer, Chief Corporate & Institutional Banking of BisB.

This follows in the footsteps of the Bank’s virtual event #AskMeAnything, hosted by the Bank in early December which was held to answer potential questions for the FinTech Competition, moderated by Maisa Shunnar, Chief Digital Transformation Officer at BisB, and attended by several members of the Banks executive team including the Chief Risk Officer, Fahim AlShafiqi; in addition to Yasmeen Al Sharaf, and as an expert in the field of Artificial Intelligence, Mr.  Frank Van Praat, Head of Trusted Analytics, AI in control at KPMG Holland joined the session as well.  

The FinTech competition, the ‘BisB Innovation Challenge’, which is currently running through the FinHub973 is challenging Globally Mature and enterprise ready Fintechs applicants, to brainstorm big ideas in the realm of ‘big data’ and develop a solution in the form of sophisticated and mature platform that uses adaptive machine learning (AI)  to empower the Bank’s financial advisory unit to enable them to provide the ultimate and personalized banking experience for their clients. 

The platform must strategically harness the power of extensive data collection and AI intelligence to provide more data-driven insights that are curated to individual customer portfolios, with a special focus on lending products. The final solution developed will require the use of sophisticated data extraction and analysis in order to effectively integrate unstructured data including key market trends, data points in broker submissions, financial history and factor in customer behavior.

On this occasion, Chief Executive Officer of BisB, Mr. Hassan Jarrar, said, “The BisB Innovation Challenge and tech-focused Fintech Competitions of this nature are imperative for innovation in this day and age, especially considering the upcoming challenges facing the financial industry, both in the wake of COVID-19 and in order to effectively bridge the existent  gap we have in the market when it comes to innovative Fintech solutions. At BisB, we want to create better synergies between FinTechs and Banks, and harness the power of technology and AI to solve real life issues, and encourage cross industry collaboration, in order to offer a transformed customer experience and simplify money matters”. 

The first round of screening will be narrowed down to ten teams, which will be then shortlisted to five teams that will be competing in a demo day. In addition to the regulatory requirements that need to be met for the platform to be viable to be introduced to the market, the proposed solution can either take the form of an early stage or build on existing product through a genuine enhancement. The shortlisted finalists of the FinTech competition, the ‘BisB Innovation challenge’ will be announced in January 2021.