Hisham Ezz Al-Arab on CIB’s leadership of the banking sector’s tech revolution: Investing in technology and big data is the way forward for the banking sector and Egypt’s financial inclusion drive, our friend CIB Chairman Hisham Ezz Al-Arab tells the Banker. “The bank is likely to benefit from its ongoing investments in technology. With an eye on the longer term, Mr. Ezz Al-Arab has placed innovation at the heart of CIB’s growth strategy under a wide-reaching digital transformation program.” CIB has in recent years prioritized investment in tech with an eye on how it will shape the banking sector going forward, a strategy that has seen the bank delve into blockchain technology, which Ezz Al-Arab expects to “transform the way business is done” within five years.

Using big data to increase efficiency and reduce costs is key to the country’s financial inclusion drive, Ezz Al-Arab tells the magazine. “For financial inclusion the name of the game is transaction costs. If you can reduce the transaction cost to zero or a fraction of a cent, then it will be easier and more efficient. What we are trying to do is use big data to reduce the transaction cost,” Ezz Al-Arab says. CIB is also employing big data analytics to increase its efficiency and for compliance purposes, including detecting fraud with an anomaly detection model with an accuracy rate significantly higher than the global average. “These innovations, among others, are good examples of what Mr Ezz Al-Arab describes as the bank’s ‘competitive metabolism’. Few other lenders in the Egyptian market — or indeed the wider region — are engaging with technology, and big data analytics in particular, to the same extent.”