Combining Islamic financial principles with AI-native technology to build a new financial model from Abu Dhabi for global markets
Abu Dhabi, UAE – August , 2026: Abdallah Abu-Sheikh, Founder and CEO of Mal, said 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.
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.
Building Financial Services Around the Customer:
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$230 million 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 should not sit on top of banking; it should change how banking works,” said Abu-Sheikh. “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.”
For Abu-Sheikh, this also changes the role a financial platform can play in customers’ lives. Rather than simply providing products or completing transactions, technology can help customers better understand how they earn, spend, save and borrow, giving them clearer information and more personalized guidance to make better financial decisions.
At Mal, this thinking extends beyond how financial services are delivered to the principles on which they are built.
Islamic Principles for a New Generation of Financial Services
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.
From Abu Dhabi to the world, Mal combines principles rooted in more than 1,400 years of Islamic heritage with technology built from the ground up around artificial intelligence.
For Abu-Sheikh, this creates an opportunity to take principles that have remained relevant for generations and deliver them through a financial experience that is simpler, more modern and more accessible to customers around the world.
The UAE is well positioned to support this ambition, ranking third globally in the Islamic Finance Development Indicator 2025, with Islamic financial assets reaching AED 1.4 trillion across 43 licensed institutions and targeted to reach AED 2.56 trillion by 2031.
As the sector continues to grow, Abu-Sheikh believes its ability to keep pace with new technologies and emerging financial products will be equally important.
Keeping Pace with Financial Innovation
For Abu-Sheikh, maintaining strong principles does not mean standing still. As new financial products, technologies and forms of investing emerge, financial institutions need to continually develop how they understand and assess them.
This includes areas such as digital assets and cryptocurrencies, which he believes should be evaluated based on how they work and whether they align with Islamic financial principles, rather than being broadly accepted or rejected simply because they are new.
The opportunity, he said, is to build an approach that can keep pace with financial innovation while remaining grounded in the principles that guide how financial services are designed and delivered.
For Mal, the ability to combine these principles with new technology is also central to a broader ambition: building a financial platform in Abu Dhabi that can compete and scale globally.
An Entrepreneurial Journey That Shaped Mal:
Before founding Mal, Abu-Sheikh founded and built technology companies including Astra Tech and Botim, experiences that strengthened his belief that the most valuable products begin with real, recurring problems and have the potential to solve them at scale.
At 26, Abu-Sheikh raised US$500 million in funding, but says he never viewed capital raised as the measure of a company’s success. Instead, he believes value comes from solving a clear problem, building a product customers genuinely need and creating a company capable of sustaining its growth.
That philosophy has carried into Mal. For Abu-Sheikh, building a company should begin with the problem that needs to be solved, rather than the technology used to solve it.
