Saudi Arabia-based fintech start-up Lean Technologies is preparing to go public as it explores new investment opportunities to expand its business beyond open banking.
According to Lean CEO Hisham Al-Falih, the company wants to increase its product offerings in financial domains such as money transfers, alternative credit, insurance, and pensions. In 2024, the Riyadh-based company secured USD 67.5 million in Series B funding led by Silicon Valley-based venture capital group General Catalyst.
Established in 2019, Lean is building an integration layer on top of the Middle East’s banking infrastructure, helping financial industry players in the region execute their digital transformation goals by leveraging the start-up’s cutting-edge applications.
Supporting The Financial Industry’s Transformation
Taking a digital-heavy route is not an easy task for any financial venture. It comes with its own set of complex challenges, such as infrastructure management. Lean handles this task on behalf of its client banks (and fintech peers) by localising and transforming data on a regional basis. When transforming data from multiple sources across various jurisdictions, Lean provides a single universal plug-and-play API.
In the fintech industry, APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) act as the connective tissue, enabling seamless and secure communication between different software systems such as banks, third-party apps, and payment processors. They serve as the backbone of modern financial services, allowing for innovation, efficiency, and a connected ecosystem where new products can be built without starting from scratch.
However, as appealing as APIs may sound, developing them is full of challenges and frustrations. Lean was built specifically to handle these complexities so that fintech players can dedicate their efforts entirely to innovation.
Lean, integrated with a variety of advanced financial apps across the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region, enables apps on customers’ smartphones to create services that help them build budgets, secure better loan rates, transfer money to friends, and more. These apps then provide powerful experiences for consumers when connected with payments and data from their bank accounts.
The Key Products
The start-up standardises different data formats from various banks into one easily readable format. This structured data helps Lean’s clients build prediction models, risk-scoring algorithms, and much more while reducing the risk of fraud or human error by automatically verifying customers through their account/IBAN (International Bank Account Number) information.
On the customer identity verification front, Lean uses APIs to help banks and fintech ventures capture all customer information with a single API call (the practice of making a solitary request to an API to perform a specific action or retrieve particular data). Financial institutions also get to capture information for all individuals linked to a single bank account.
Lean’s financial insights services categorise transactions using APIs that automatically assign categories based on 16 pre-assigned sections to standardise outputs. A set of API endpoints provides unique insights to help financial institutions simplify and improve their risk-scoring models.
The ultimate goal is to enable financial ventures to go beyond financial data and build more meaningful, business-critical tools, such as in-depth risk-scoring models, recommendation engines, and more.
Solutions Using Data
On KYC, AML (Anti-Money Laundering), and customer onboarding fronts, Lean is helping financial institutions maximise conversions by simplifying and speeding up first-time user experiences on their platforms. The start-up’s clients no longer need to maintain large, budget-heavy onboarding teams.
Functions such as validating customer identities and verifying their financial track records are achieved through a simple integration of Lean’s digital solutions into bank systems. In addition to automatically capturing and extracting all relevant information (such as name, phone number, and address) from customers’ bank accounts, Lean’s matching engine ensures the name provided by a customer matches the account holder to protect against fraud and money laundering.
Credit and risk scoring is another crucial area where Lean’s API-based expertise is proving invaluable, as the start-up helps financial institutions speed up the process of collecting, verifying, and scoring customers’ financial data. The company has focused on two areas: accurate risk profiling and automated income verification.
The “Financial Data API” cleans and standardises crucial customer data for Lean’s clients, while the data insights algorithm identifies and assigns each transaction into one of 16 pre-defined categories. This workflow reduces onboarding time and enables a real-time picture of creditworthiness, thereby boosting customer conversions.
Building meaningful insights from financial data that’s collected, collated, and standardised in a cleaner, simpler way is another area where the financial industry often struggles. Raw banking data is unstructured, and cleaning and standardising it is complex. Managing connections to multiple banks is also time-consuming and costly.
Financial Data API is proving useful here as well, turning streams of transactions from multiple accounts into structured financial data. This not only helps banks and fintech players generate meaningful insights but also helps them act on them and build new value-added services.
Making B2B And C2B Transfers Easy
Bank transfers to digital wallets often require customers to use third-party apps. Additionally, card payments result in high fees for both parties, leading to slow onboarding and lower conversions. To address this, Lean has introduced its fully native in-app payment experience, covering everything from bank connection to payment execution and reconciliation. This friction-free onboarding directly boosts customer conversions, and direct bank transfers eliminate high fees and chargebacks.
The start-up’s “Connect SDK” allows Lean’s clients to build a simple bank connection on their platform that not only captures customer data but also adds themselves as a beneficiary in the customer’s account for payments. The mechanism is fully configurable for all client platforms. From connecting the customer’s bank account to initiating payments, everything happens within a single platform.
E-commerce companies, which often face payment challenges such as cash collection costs, card-processing fees, and settlement delays, are also being supported by Lean to conduct real-time payment settlements through direct bank transfers. This reduces costs for both customers and businesses while lowering delays in order processing.
These businesses can also process customer withdrawal and refund requests with confidence and speed using Lean’s end-to-end bulk payments system, which consolidates all incoming withdrawal and refund requests in one place.
Lean is also helping financial institutions quickly and easily disburse loans to verified customers by digitising the disbursement process, which saves time and money and reduces human error.
While the start-up’s clients can seamlessly disburse multiple loans from a single interface, they can expedite the process further by setting up custom automations for payouts to be processed as they are requested, instead of manually authorising each one.