Banks in the UAE know which problems they want fintechs to solve. What they lack, is a fast, repeatable way of finding the right partner and proving the solution works.
VerityX Innovation Labs, a governed innovation programme backed by the Emirates Institute of Finance (EIF) that aims to compress the bank innovation cycle from as much as a year down to 90 days.
Mark Rothwell-Brooks is chief executive of VerityX, a Dubai-based consultancy that, in his words, “delivers outcomes for banks”. The firm built its history on IT change delivery in the UK banking community before entering the Gulf market around two years ago, where much of its work has involved positioning fintech capability inside banks.
That vantage point exposed the problem the Labs are built to fix. “What we found is that it is quite a fragmented ecosystem,” he told The Fintech Times. “The timescale for which banks can identify the challenges, work out who they are going to work with and then bring those into their organisation is a massively elongated timeframe.”
Each bank, he says, evaluates fintechs its own way, with its own pet vendors, its own procurement cycle and its own duplicated infrastructure. “By the time a bank has identified what the problem statement is, worked out who they could work with, taken those people through some form of engagement to onboard them, gone through the lower environments and fixed it, that is a nine to 12 month process. By the time they have fixed whatever it is they thought they wanted to fix, the requirements have changed.”
The programme’s response is a four-step model. Banks first coalesce around shared challenge themes, spanning AI, credit, payments, fraud detection, compliance and client intelligence, which are published as a rolling challenge calendar locked down three to six months ahead. Fintechs, from the UAE, the wider GCC or anywhere in the world, apply to the challenges that fit them and are credentialled before any bank interaction takes place. Selected applicants then build and test in a fully synthetic banking sandbox, with no real customer data, no API exposure and no legal contracts required before testing begins. Finally, each challenge produces a set of artefacts: what worked, the dos and don’ts, and the regulatory view, so any bank can replicate the winning solution.
“We watch the magic happen,” is how Rothwell-Brooks describes the sandbox stage. The target is harder-edged: “From ideation through to proof of concept, we want to get that down to 90 days initially. We want to get it quicker, but the 90-day target is our first target. Going from 12 months to 90 days will be a needle shift in terms of innovation cycle.”
The programme is targeting roughly 50 financial institutions across the UAE, from tier one to tier four, and Rothwell-Brooks reports interest across the whole spectrum. The tier ones, which often run innovation infrastructure of their own, see the Labs as augmentation. For the smaller banks the appeal is more fundamental. “They haven’t made the investment in the technical infrastructure to trial it, they haven’t made the investment in the processes to identify the global fintechs that can address the challenges. So those tier two to four banks are interested because it fast-tracks their ability to execute and innovate.”
Crucially, participation is not limited to the region. If UAE bank security chiefs identify a thematic problem that, say, Singapore’s fintechs are already ahead on, the programme will actively recruit them. “It is open to any fintech globally to join the programme,” he says, and the ambition runs further still: after banking comes insurance, then the wider financial services market, with the model itself eventually exported to other markets.
Challenge themes will come “from the banks up and from the regulator down”, with participating institutions able to put forward and prioritise the problems that matter most to the market. Rothwell-Brooks calls the consensus-building exercise “herding the cats”, but is pragmatic about the threshold: two or three banks agreeing on a thematic problem the regulator also cares about is enough to run a challenge.
The first of those challenges is already defined: AI-powered mule account detection and interdiction for UAE banks, an inter-bank challenge scheduled for 28 September 2026 and squarely aligned with the Central Bank of the UAE’s supervisory expectations on real-time mule detection. Fintechs and regtechs working in fraud detection, transaction monitoring, behavioural analytics or financial-crime AI can register on the VerityX Labs platform, where the challenge calendar and enrolment process are published.
For an ecosystem long on ambition and short on structural plumbing, the pitch is a striking one: a continuous, governed engine where banks define the problems, credentialled fintechs prove the solutions, and the gap between the two closes in weeks rather than years.
Watch the full interview with Mark Rothwell-Brooks on The Fintech Times YouTube channel:
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