System will make it easier for nationals setting up companies to employ expat workers

Saudi Arabia is to allow an instant small business visa for people looking to set up new firms in the kingdom from next month.

The move, which was announced by the Minister of Labour and Social Development, Ahmed bin Sulaiman Al-Rajhi, last week, is being created to help Saudi nationals more easily launch their own start-ups and small businesses and will be housed on the new Qiwa employment visa platform.

The minister announced the initiative at an event involving young entrepreneurs at Hail Chamber of Commerce, during which he said extensive studies had been conducted to determine the need for migrant workers by small businesses, according to a statement in Arabic on the ministry's website.

Growing small business participation is one of the targets set out in the kingdom's Vision 2030 plan to diversify its economy away from a dependence on hydrocarbon revenue.

Under Vision 2030, a target was set to increase the contribution made by SMEs to 35 per cent of GDP, from 20 per cent when the plan was launched in 2016.

Saudi Arabia's non-oil economy grew by 2.9 per cent in the second quarter of 2019, it's fastest rate since the end of 2015.

The growth was driven by a more favourable fiscal backdrop and strengthening investment momentum, according to Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank's chief economist Monica Malik.

The kingdom has been attempting to implement a series of reforms to improve its business environment, such as the launch of new entrepreneur licences and the setting up of bodies such as Monshaat - an authority set up specifically to support SMEs.

Saudi Arabia was the biggest climber in the World Bank's Ease of Doing Business annual ranking this year.

The kingdom jumped 30 places in the ranking to 62nd as it carried out eight reforms aimed at improving the business environment.

The UAE remains the highest-ranked Middle East country in the index, at 16th globally out of 190 countries.

source: magnitt

While there will eventually be much more to 5G than just faster download speeds for our smartphones, the truth is, that’s what most people are interested in right now.

That’s good, since it’s really all that the first deployments of 5G have to offer. The early efforts are laser focused around what the telecom industry confusingly calls eMBB, short for Enhanced Mobile Broadband.

So, the obvious question is, how much better and how much faster will 5G data connections actually be than the 4G LTE Advanced Pro connections that most people have now? Not surprisingly, as with most things 5G, the answer is a complicated “it depends.”

It turns out there are quite a few factors that influence the speed of a wireless connection, including the amount of bandwidth allocated for each connection channel between the smartphone’s modem and the telco carrier’s cellular network infrastructure.

Another factor is the type of 5G signals being used—millimeter wave (mmWave) or sub-6 Additionally, one must consider things like the number of channels that can be combined, how the signals are transmitted, the types of compression technology used, and much more.

While the full details can quickly become overwhelming, it is useful to understand at least some of the basic principles behind these technologies, as well as the buzzwords for specific capabilities and how these technologies all work together to create a fast, reliable wireless 5G connection.

The most important factor in the speed of a 5G cellular connection (or, for that matter, any wireless connection) is the width of the individual channel used to connect between a device and a network. Think of it as the width of a pipe.

The wider the pipe, the more data that can pass through it.

These chunks of radio spectrum, measured in MHz, are the base unit that determines how much information can be delivered through a single connection at the same time, otherwise known as the amount of throughput.

For 4G LTE networks, the channels could range from 1 MHz up to 20 MHz, but with 5G, individual channels can be as wide as 100 MHz—theoretically offering up to five times the bandwidth of a 4G connection.

In fact, this one difference in the 5G NR (New Radio) standard is probably the most important reason that 5G networks can be faster than 4G ones.

What isn’t widely understood is the fact that the width of individual transmission channels is strongly influenced by the frequencies on which they are transmitted, but is not determined by the frequency. What that means is that, all things being equal, 10 MHz of bandwidth at 600 MHz provides the same level of data throughput (i.e., speed) as 10 MHz of bandwidth at 39 GHz.

However, there’s a big historical influence on the width of channels that were allocated to certain frequencies—particularly in the lower ranges, such as under 2 GHz.

In the early days of spectrum allocation (the process of assigning the exclusive use of certain frequencies for certain applications or to certain companies), many of the lower frequencies were the first to be allocated, because they were easier to transmit.

Many of the first wireless applications had very small bandwidth demands, so the size of the allocation “chunks” for channels at different frequencies was quite small. Unfortunately, that historical legacy maintains a strong influence on channel size for lower bandwidth frequencies.

As 5G was developed, one of the core ideas was to increase the width of channels in order to be able to increase the overall potential speed of the network. In part, this was possible because none of the historical channel size limitations were in place for previously unused frequencies like mmWave.

"There’s much more to the potential speed of a connection than just the bandwidth of a single channel Modern cellular network connections combine several different channels together in various different ways"

But there’s much more to the potential speed of a connection than just the bandwidth of a single channel.

Modern cellular network connections combine several different channels together in various different ways (several of which can be combined together for even more throughput!).

Carrier Aggregation, or CA, is a technology that lets telecom companies leverage the different sets of frequencies that they each own into a more robust offering.

Think of it like a highway, where cars in a single lane represent the bytes of data transferred over a single channel, but all the vehicles across a multi-lane highway combine to describe the total potential throughput of the road.

With 4x Carrier Aggregation, you can combine four of these lanes into a single unified connection. What’s particularly important to note is that you can even combine “lanes” from very different parts of the radio spectrum. So, for example, you can combine a range of 10MHz from the 600 MHz frequency band along with 100 MHz of spectrum from the 39 GHz frequency to get a combined data speed that’s faster than both individually. Not surprisingly, you can also combine batches of frequencies that sit right next to each in the frequency spectrum.

In 5G Non-Standalone (NSA) networks ,you can also do the equivalent of Carrier Aggregation across 4G and 5G channels at different frequencies.

The technology that enables this is called Dual Connectivity, and like CA, it combines the bandwidth of the two together.

Yet another technology available for 5G networks called Dynamic Spectrum Sharing (DSS) lets you do the same thing on 4G and 5G signals that broadcast at the same frequency.

Because the only frequencies that are used for both 4G and 5G are below 3 GHz, DSS only works with sub-6 frequencies and is not used for mmWave.

There is a bit of overhead associated with DSS such that you lose a bit of the combined bandwidth total. Nevertheless, DSS is a very important technology, because it provides both an easy way for carriers to “turn on” 5G services using their existing 4G frequencies and lets them combine the usage of the two to improve throughput.

One important point to note is Dual Connectivity will not work on Standalone 5G networks (DSS does) because as the name implies, these networks will not have any connections or dependences on 4G networks. While there are other factors that may influence throughput when 5G SA networks launch, practically speaking, this does mean 5G SA networks could be a bit slower than 5G NSA networks in certain situations.

In 5G (both NSA and SA), you can also leverage Concurrent Carriers, or CC, which are conceptually similar to CA across a continuous range of frequency bands. For sub-6 5G service, you can combine up to two 100 MHz channels to get a maximum of 200 MHz of bandwidth, whereas mmWave supports up to 8CC for 800 MHz.

This, combined with the fact that the millimeter wave frequencies are far more likely to use the full 100 MHz potential per channel (whereas many sub-6 5G frequencies have channels that are much smaller than 100 MHz), is why mmWave 5G service has been so much faster than sub-6 5G in the first real-world tests. Of course, that faster speed also carries with it a significantly shorter range, which is why both mmWave and sub-6 frequencies have important roles to play in 5G.

At present, none of the telco networks support more than 4CC, or 400 MHz, of bandwidth for mmWave, but modems like Qualcomm’s X55 support the maximum, meaning there will eventually be even faster mmWave performance.

Other factors that influence the speed of wireless data connections include transmission technologies like MIMO (Multiple Input, Multiple Output), which allows signals to be sent over multiple antennas inside a device simultaneously instead just of one at a time.

With 4G, it’s possible to do 4x4 MIMO, which, as its name implies, allows four simultaneous connections to occur.

A new capability for 5G is called Massive MIMO, and it can support up to 100 simultaneous connections by targeting a radio transmission beam in a specific direction.

For mmWave frequencies, Massive MIMO is enabled through a technology called beam forming which, as its name suggests, can create very tightly targeted beams of radio signal thanks to the use of many tiny, steerable antennas.

An important data compression technology that’s used in many smartphones is called QAM (quadrature amplitude modulation) and the latest version of it is QAM 1024.

While it’s easy to forget, cellular connections are actually based on analog waveforms, and QAM technology provides a very sophisticated way to encode more bits of data into an analog radio frequency signal.

Another point to remember about all these technology factors is that they can be cumulative, but they aren’t always. You could have a connection that supports Dual Connectivity and Massive MIMO but only 256 QAM, etc.

The number of possibilities quickly becomes overwhelming, even for telco equipment makers, so the industry tried to simplify things on the 4G side through the creation of what are called LTE Categories, which combine features like the number of channels of Carrier Aggregation, the amount of MIMO, and the type of QAM into a single category rating that’s typically shortened to Cat, such as Cat 24.

The category numbers are used by both devices like smartphones and network infrastructure equipment to quickly identify what set of features each end of the connection has in order to optimize the connection with whatever technologies are available. Interestingly, the 3GPP has chosen not to continue the categories with 5G, so there are currently no 5G categories.

The final thing to compare when thinking about network performance is the efficiency of the signal and transmission system of each of the cellular network “G” standards.

In a simple comparison of 4G signals and 5G signals being broadcast at the same frequency, the difference in data throughput with all other factors being equal is very modest between the two “G’s”.

The 5G connection will be faster because of more efficiency in the encoding and transmission of 5G signals (thanks to enhancement built into the 5G NR, or New Radio, standard), but the difference will only be in the 5-10% range for 5G over 4G.

As with most all wireless technologies, all the capabilities described above have to be supported both on the device and within the cellular network to which it’s connecting in order to work. In the case of the device, many of these capabilities are determined by the specific type of modem built into the phone and the features it offers.

While most people don’t bother diving into anywhere near this level of detail on smartphone modem specs, modem capabilities can be very important, particularly for 5G.

In situations where the technologies aren’t supported—such as in remote areas that may not have updated network infrastructure equipment installed—they’re simply not used for that particular session. As you move to different locations throughout the day, and therefore switch your cell connection from one tower to another (a pretty magical part of cellular networks that’s very easy to overlook), you may find your connection speeds improving, some of which could be due to the use of these different technologies.

If you’re curious to know how fast your connections are throughout the day, you’ll definitely want to download a handy utility called SpeedTest onto your mobile phone.

It provides a very simple way to see both the download and upload speeds of your connection at any given time and in any given location.

What you’ll quickly discover is that it can vary quite a bit from location to location because of all the factors discussed here, as well as many more, such as how busy the network is and potential interference.

Also, remember that the specifications for smartphones and their key components typically are best-case scenarios. In the real world, actual results can be very different and almost always lower.

Finally, to get back to the original question posed in the title, at the present time, we should see 5G speeds in the 400-500 Megabit per second (Mbps) range for sub-6 5G service and over 1.5 Gigabits per second (Gbps) for mmWave, when the services are available.

That’s significantly faster than the 35 Mbps average across the US right now for 4G services, so it’s easy to see why people are excited about the speeds that 5G can offer.

source: forbes

Financial technology (fintech), for all of its faults, helps us get more things done more efficiently. Artificial Intelligence (AI) takes it even further, allowing us to conduct business and have conversations when there isn’t even another human involved.

We can have online chats with bots, for example, to accomplish or learn myriad things. Innovation is always on the horizon, though, especially in the fintech realm. 

As more fintech options become commonplace, every industry must either adapt or be phased out.

With the turn of the new year, 2020 promises big changes in how we manage, spend and access our money, so you'll want to keep an eye on some of these emerging trends as you make financial decisions regarding partnerships and investments.

Minimizing Traditional Institutions

Several types of financial business elements that have been handled manually or by standard institutions, like payroll, insurance and securities, are becoming automated.

We’re seeing online-only banking that eliminates the cost of brick-and-mortar buildings, and the best of them will be sharing the benefits with their customers in the form of higher returns and lower fees. 

Companies adapting quickly to fintech and automation should also work to uphold compliance and maintain good standing with the governing agencies.

As regulation and risk-management for fraud, money-laundering and identity theft are becoming big business, regulation technology (regtech) companies are utilizing AI to combat these crimes faster and more efficiently than humans can.

The growth of fintech is causing a wave of startups and the opportunity for investment in the regtech realm.

Stepping Up Online Trading 

Black box trading is a proprietary, fully automated option for your investments that has been talked up and down for its attributes.

It’s legal since it’s not expressly illegal, and relies on algorithmic and low-latency technologies. Computers and data-mining are not infallible, though, so you might want to consider a more personal approach. 

Copy trading is basically crowd-sourcing applied to your portfolio. You can choose your favorite investors to follow and mirror their investment moves based on whatever percentage you want to allocate. Not only can it open you up to investments you might not know about, but you’ll also be able to interact with and gain insight from other members and influencers in real-time. 

Monitoring Cryptocurrency Advancements and Conversions  

In the digital world, financial assets can be used and exchanged with cryptocurrency, which isn’t tied to standard currency systems.

Its online, open-source administration doesn’t require banks or governments for regulation or exchanges, allowing anyone to participate in the system from anywhere in the world.

However, since there is so little regulation, the cryptocurrency market is extremely volatile. Several companies are trying to be competitive with Bitcoin as the space continues to evolve.

Smart contracts represent one such innovation by allowing people to enter into business contracts online with the terms managed by the system automatically as the parties verify that they’ve held up their end of the deal.

This could be revolutionary for the real estate market.

While blockchain transactions normally take place on public ledgers, many people don’t want their financial transactions to be public knowledge for a multitude of valid (or shady) reasons.

There are companies out there offering a type of cryptography that makes transactions anonymous and untraceable without damaging the blockchains.

This can create interesting options for investors and further regtech developments as well.

Although converting your cryptocurrency to real-world currency is possible with Bitcoin ATMs in many major cities, it’s not easily accessible.

There are a few online-conversion services and crypto debit cards. These methods often have fees, taxes and delays that hinder access to your money, which means it’s a wide-open avenue for innovation and new technology to emerge. 

Considering Mergers and Collaborations

Finally, as you watch for opportunities to invest or invent, I predict you’ll continue to find that banks are trying to create partnerships with fintech and regtech companies as a means to stay relevant. Don’t be surprised if these are unsuccessful at saving the traditional institutions, because most of them are still trying to operate under the same old standards. They need new strategies for marketing and product offerings, not just new accounts on their books. As you move into 2020, keep that in mind for your own business decisions as well.

source:entrepreneur

What’s stopping you fulfilling your potential, preventing you from taking action or slowing your progress as a business owner?

Conditioning your mind for success involves letting these things well and truly slide:

The opinions of naysayers

If you have a plan that you are convinced will work, go for it. If it’s true to your values, fits with your vision and you feel good about it, why not? Not everyone will agree with you because they don’t know what you are capable of. They don’t realise you’ve already done your research, weighed up the pros and cons and crafted a strategy. You know your audience and only they determine your fate.

Many an entrepreneur has been told that their business idea will never take off. It doesn’t mean it’s true. Someone airing their doubts about your business is a projection of their reality, not yours. Don’t internalise negativity levelled at you and don’t let someone else’s limited beliefs be yours.

Thinking too small

As Daniel Burnham, architect of Chicago, once said, “make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably themselves will not be realized.” Make plans so big they scare you. Make plans so big that thinking about achieving them spurs you into action and motivates you to keep going. The small wins will happen along the way as you consistently put the work in, but it’s the big juicy needle-moving accomplishments that make you remarkable.

You don’t need to tell everyone your grandiose plans. Just know them yourself and know the steps ahead of achieving them. As Seth Godin said, “you’re either remarkable or invisible.”

Feeling embarrassed

No matter what you’re creating or selling, you will, at some point, need to put yourself out there. For your customers to buy into your brand and your story they will need to see it. This is no time to shy away from the limelight for fear of ridicule.

If you have a niggling feeling that something isn’t right, work out what it is and fix it. If the only niggling feeling is the adrenalin you get from being centre stage, channel it into action, start taking action and find your audience.

Maybe it is embarrassing telling people that you’re starting a business, or growing a business, or looking for customers. But who cares? Be shameless. You’d much rather do that than sit in silence and let opportunities pass you by.

Dreams without plans and action

There must be a connection between the dreams you have and the actions you are putting in place. Avoid having dreams that don’t link to plans because you will just get frustrated at not achieving them. You might think you want to be fluent in Spanish, but have you signed up to the courses, downloaded the language apps and booked the trip to Madrid? A dream without a plan is just a wish, and wishing is not a strategy for success.

Turning up to an arbitrary desk for eight hours a day to tap away at a keyboard answering emails and going to pointless meetings isn’t progress. It’s definitely busyness, it’s definitely activity, but wasting time in between weekends isn’t going to get you to the milestones you have in mind. If you really want to get somewhere, work out the route there and ignore everything else.

Feeling like it’s too soon

If your current situation is cushy or if you are daunted by the thought of starting a business, it will never feel like the right time to begin. If you’re already running a profitable and stable organisation, it might not ever feel like the right time to think bigger, reinvest or take risks. Sure, you could hang back, take it slower and play golf on weekdays, but you’re capable of so much more than that and you’d be doing yourself and the world a disservice to succumb.

The hardest thing is starting. Once you’ve started, you know the drill and you learn quickly from there. You develop conscious competence, then unconscious competence, and then suddenly you can do the basics excellently without even trying. That’s where the real magic happens and that’s the time to keep pushing, not the time to back off. Get started now.

Being all talk

In the 2015 film The Big Short, Christian Bale plays Michael Burry, one of the first people to discover the American housing market bubble.

When he’s working, operating his own hedge fund, he is running through the numbers doing the work that his clients commission him to do.

He could spend his days gossiping with them or talking vaguely about investing, but he doesn’t.

He communicates only when he has something important to say. He has something important to say because he’s working at it and not looking for excuses not to.

Deep down, you know what you should be doing and how spending your time will add the most value.

But there’s a difference between saying you want to write a book and actually writing a book. Between launching a brilliant product and just talking about it. Progress, not busyness. Action, not words.

Fear of failure

When starting or scaling a business, things will crop up that you haven’t foreseen. It’s inevitable. But working out how to move past obstacles, as well as seeing them as fun challenges to be solved, is what separates great entrepreneurs from those who never quite reach their potential.

What’s the worst that can happen? It doesn’t work out, you have to close down and then you start again. I’d choose that over never starting any day.

If you don’t view anything as failure then it’s not failure. If someone else views it as failure then they have no place in your life. Only your labels for you count. You only fail when you give up.

Get comfortable in that unknown space and don’t tie your own success to outcomes you can’t control, or winning the support of people who don’t have your back.

If you need some motivation to see past potential failure, talk to someone who has achieved things you aspire to achieve, make yourself a hype playlist or remind yourself that one day you won’t be here and neither will anyone you know. 

source: forbes

This past week, I attended Ernst & Young’s Strategic Growth Forum U.S. event. With some of the smartest founders in the country, I chatted about best practices and trends that will shape 2020.

Although my prior co-founder and I received the “Best Emerging Company” award at the 2016 event, I joined this year not as a competitor but as a listener.

I came away with new ideas for growing my company while playing it safe, which will be key in what I and others expect to be a volatile election year. With uncertainty ahead, I paid special attention to the trends on attendees’ minds. These five came up again and again:

1- Optimization is becoming the new risk management.

With political tensions running high and a potential recession on everyone’s radar, it’s no wonder this year’s event was focused on playing it safe while doubling down. Lee Henderson, EY Americas Growth Markets Leader, hit on the importance of Playing it Safe, but still doubling down. Lee said “Companies need to look at things like contracts, vendors, costs, and business operations so that there’s comfort in efficiency, but they should still be looking for areas to grow and innovate. There will certainly be opportunities, and you want to be ready to capitalize on them when the time comes.”

According to EY data, entrepreneurs are more optimistic about those opportunities than other business leaders. Among entrepreneurs, 67% said they were focused on “pursuing new market opportunities,” compared to just 19% of leaders at large companies. 

2- Industry-specific startups are seeing the greatest growth.

One of my favorite people I met at this year’s event was Brad Keywell, CEO of Uptake and 2019’s World Entrepreneur of the Year. Brad echoed my belief that the best opportunities for entrepreneurs are not always found in broad business services. “Big companies like Amazon are great at delivering value through technology to mass market audiences,” Brad explained. “It’s the niches they do not deal in that offer real opportunity to entrepreneurs, who can be flexible and move quickly.”

3-Non-technical entrepreneurs are winning with partnerships.

Plenty of people with big ideas cannot code. Todd Buelow, founder of Dualboot Partners, pointed out to me that more non-technical entrepreneurs are trusting others to build out the technologies needed to turn their dreams into reality. 

The reason for this, according to Todd, is that a lot of tech experts are also turning to entrepreneurship. They may have the skills to build the product, but they often need help on the sales and marketing side of things — where many non-technical founders shine.

4-Teams are using technology to maximize their operations.

One way companies are playing it safe, as Lee Henderson suggested they should, is through technology. Time-saving tools make it possible for entrepreneurs to accomplish more with fewer resources.One company at ground zero of this trend is Teamwork, a project management platform based in Ireland. CEO Peter Coppinger, who received the EY Ireland Entrepreneur of the Year award, and I talked at length about how efficiency improvements across operating systems are a great way to stay safe while pursuing growth.

 5-Companies are becoming more culture-conscious.

A theme I heard over and over — and I wholeheartedly agree with — is that it’s people who make a business thrive. Many of the people who attended EY’s event this year wanted to learn about building diverse teams, bringing out the best in their employees, and creating the sort of work culture where the best employees want to stay. Especially with unemployment at record lows, a lot of entrepreneurs are struggling to find talent. The solution, I and others have found, is to invest in team members’ personal growth. That means providing a flexible work environment, plenty of autonomy, and performance-based compensation like profit sharing to maintain motivation.

Trend predictions do not always pan out, but I’m convinced EY attendees know what they’re talking about. With the new year just weeks away, I’ll be investing in areas like culture and technology that provide protection without putting a damper on growth. Bring it on, 2020.

source: forbes

Kuwait Investment Authority's decision to participate in the deal or not will depend on a "study" of the IPO

DUBAI- Saudi Aramco met investors in Dubai on Sunday to market its initial public offering (IPO), after trying to secure demand from Kuwait's sovereign wealth fund for the deal, worth up to $25.6 billion, which relies heavily on local and regional buyers.

Top executives of the Saudi state-owned oil giant, including Aramco's Chief Executive Amin Nasser, met officials of Kuwait's sovereign wealth fund weeks ago, a source familiar with the matter said, confirming an earlier report on Sunday in the Kuwaiti newspaper Alrai.

Meanwhile, Aramco's management including its finance head and advisers met with institutional investors at an IPO roadshow in Dubai on Sunday, the second outside Riyadh after the company decided to cancel all roadshows in developed markets.

The Kuwaiti newspaper said the Kuwait Investment Authority's (KIA) decision on whether to participate in the deal would depend on a "study" of the IPO.

Aramco said in an email it did not comment on specific investor meetings.

The KIA did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment. In late October, the KIA's managing director Farouk Bastaki said Aramco had not approached the fund then, but that the KIA would look at the IPO like any other investment. 

Talks have taken place with sovereign investors including the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, Singapore's GIC and other funds, sources have told Reuters. 

DUBAI ROADSHOW

Aramco has struggled to attract a major cornerstone or anchor investor for its IPO, which could be potentially the world's biggest.

An executive at a London-based fund, who attended the roadshow in Dubai, told Reuters he was interested in the IPO, but declined to provide more details.

Some investors asked Aramco about the sustainability of its dividend policy.

Aramco has set a base dividend of $75 billion for five years.

A second executive at an investment firm said Aramco did not say whether that base level might grow.

The meeting was led by Aramco's senior vice president of finance, strategy and development, Khaled al-Dabbagh, and Yasser Mufti, the company's vice president of strategy and market analysis, sources said.

"The only thing left for comfort is the Saudi government, it’s fiscal policy and ability to sustain the dividends," said a fund manager. "If you’re OK with that, you’ll invest."

Over 20 people, wearing suits, walked into the presentation area at a luxury hotel in Dubai's financial district, but hotel security restricted entry for reporters.

Another roadshow is planned in Abu Dhabi on Monday.

"Looks like there's a lot of interest both from retail investors and institutions." K. V. Vijay Raghavan, group finance director at Dubai-based investment firm Arenco told Reuters after attending the roadshow.

"I wish it was more like $1.4 trillion to $1.5 trillion, but this is what it is," he said, referring to the company's aim to achieve a valuation of $1.6-$1.7 trillion.

However, he also said that looking at the investor interest, the IPO could hit the top end of the valuation range.

Aramco plans to sell 1.5% of the company. The deal is the centrepiece of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's plans to diversify the Saudi economy away from its reliance on oil.

Saudi Arabia's central bank governor told Reuters on Sunday in Riyadh that it was monitoring banking indicators on a daily basis and was not seeing any impact on liquidity from the IPO.

source: zawyazawya

The new framework is set to encourage small and medium-sized investments, according to the MOF

With UAE Cabinet’s approval an insolvency law that regulates cases involving individuals facing financial difficulties, the legal framework is now set to better ensure the rights of both creditors and debtors, according to the Ministry of Finance.

“This law creates a safe environment for personal loans to the satisfaction of both the creditor and the debtor, as it provides the balance to ensure the rights of both creditor and debtor,” Younis Haji Al Khoori, Undersecretary of the Ministry of Finance, told reporters in Abu Dhabi.

“The law thereby encourages increased cash flows and attracts small and medium-sized investments to the state,” he added.

These are the key details of the law, based on additional information from the Ministry of Finance:

• The new legislation is expected to make it easier for individuals to obtain loans, as there are clear and easy-to-apply rules for the collection of bad debts and rehabilitation of debtors financially.
• This improves creditor banks’ confidence in retail lending and encourages individuals to engage in calculated borrowing.
• The law ensures the protection of the debtor’s dignity as a natural person (that is, an individual, rather than a company or organization) and helps create an opportunity for them to reduce their financial burden.
• The law provides two means to address the insolvency of individuals: first, by possibly settling financial obligations, and second, through insolvency and liquidation of funds.

The debtor can file an application with the court for an opportunity to settle their financial obligations, and the court will appoint one or more experts to assist them during these proceedings.

• When preparations begin on a plan to reorganize and settle financial obligations, the settlement plan shall be voted on by the creditors.
• The debtor may choose the second option (of liquidating their funds to pay their debts) if they have stopped paying any of their debts on the due dates for more than 50 consecutive working days due to financial inability.
• In the event of liquidation of funds, a trustee shall be appointed to control and facilitate the liquidation of the debtor’s funds.
• Funds excluded from liquidation procedures are pension or social benefits provided to the debtor as well as funds required by the debtor to meet their basic needs and those of their dependents. The latter amount is specified by the court.
• The period for the execution of the financial liability settlement plan may not exceed three years from the date of the ratification of the plan by the court.

source: zawya

From 2013 to 2018, the GCC insurance industry grew at a CAGR of 8.9%

The GCC insurance market is projected to grow at a moderate pace of 4.3 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) to reach $36.1 billion in 2024 from $29.2 billion in 2018, Alpen Capital said in a report.

The outlook for the GCC insurance industry remains positive, “primarily led by a sustained economic growth, diversification of the economy, increase of the population as well as the implementation of mandatory insurance,” Krishna Dhanak, Executive Director at Alpen Capital said during a media roundtable.

From 2013 to 2018, the GCC insurance industry grew however at a higher CAGR of 8.9 percent from $18.4 billion to $28.2 billion, the Alpen report showed.

The market share of each GCC country is expected to remain constant through 2024 according to Alpen Capital. The UAE will continue to maintain its position as the largest market in the region.

The gradual slowdown of the insurance industry that was witnessed in the last two years as various players adapted to new regulations such as solvency requirements, minimum capital requirements and pricing policies, is likely to continue until 2024, Dhanak said.

Dhanak said that M&As in the sector remained active over the past two years as companies sought to build stronger balance sheets to sustain the stringent reserve and solvency requirements.

“In addition to interest from foreign players, we expect to see continuing M&A activity as companies develop technological capabilities to broaden their product offering and improve profitability,” he added.

According to the report, insurance penetration (ratio of total insurance premiums to GDP) in the region is expected to remain between 1.8 percent and 1.9 percent from 2019 to 2024, below the global average of 6.1 percent, offering scope for growth in the sector.

Insurance density (ratio of premium underwritten to total population) in the GCC is expected to increase from $502.9 in 2019 to $555.8 in 2024. Life insurance gross written premium (GWP) is projected to grow at a CAGR of 4.9 percent to reach $4.7 billion in 2024.

The non-life segment will continue to comprise 86.9 percent of the total insurance market at $31.4 billion in 2024, the report noted.

In the next 5 years, the UAE’s insurance market is forecasted to grow at a CAGR of 4.2 percent while the Saudi Insurance market will grow at a CAGR of 5 percent and the Kuwaiti insurance market is anticipated to grow at the fastest annualized average pace of 8.2 percent.

In 2018, the UAE recorded the highest insurance penetration and density at 2.9 per cent and $1,194.7 respectively, the report said.

One of the challenges facing the sector is its exposure to risky assets according to Alpen Capital, as insurance firms in the region have a relatively high exposure to capital markets, making them more prone to volatility in equity markets.

Another challenge is weak profitability. With 200 insurers operating in the region, the sector remains highly fragmented, pushing companies to face profitability pressure due to mounting competition, high regulatory costs and strict accounting standards, the report said.

source: zawya