As the Middle East’s fintech and digital banking ecosystem accelerates its shift toward data-driven, regulation-first innovation, WebEngage has emerged as a key partner enabling institutions to deliver compliant, hyper-personalised customer experiences at scale. Leading this transformation is Hetarth Patel, Vice President, Growth Markets – MEA, Americas & Asia Pacific, whose 24-year career in Information Communication Technology (ICT) spans strategy, global expansion, and building high-impact organisations.
A strategic thinker with a track record of driving growth across global companies, including leadership roles at Oracle and Flytxt BV, Hetarth now spearheads WebEngage’s mission to cement its position as a customer retention pioneer across MEA, the Americas, and APAC.
In this exclusive conversation with International Finance, Hetarth shares deep insights on how fintechs in Saudi Arabia and the UAE are navigating data regulations, accelerating retention-led engagement, and preparing for an AI-powered future.
How do fintechs in Saudi Arabia and the UAE balance hyper-personalisation with strict data regulations like SAMA and PDPL?
Fintechs in Saudi Arabia and the UAE have realised that personalisation and regulation don’t conflict; they require better architecture. The smart ones begin with privacy-by-design: clear consent, strict access control, and strong separation between PII and behavioural signals. Once that foundation is in place, hyper-personalisation becomes a matter of using patterns, not identities.
In Saudi Arabia, especially, SAMA and PDPL push companies to keep data within the Kingdom, so the intelligence layer has to operate locally. When you treat governance as part of the system, you can deliver real-time experiences without crossing any regulatory lines.
How is WebEngage’s regional data centre helping BFSI clients in Saudi Arabia and the UAE offer personalised experiences while staying compliant?
Our Saudi deployment was built specifically to give banks and insurers the confidence to scale personalisation without worrying about residency.
Everything from raw events to backups stays in-country, which aligns with how SAMA and PDPL expect sensitive data to be handled.
We also separate identity data from behavioural streams and let teams control exactly which fields can be used for segmentation, modelling, and journey orchestration. UAE institutions, especially those operating across borders, benefit from a similar setup because they can build seamless journeys while honouring local rules. Things move seamlessly on customer engagement because the compliance guardrails are already baked into the architecture.
With WebEngage’s ZeroPII architecture, all personally identifiable data stays entirely within the customer’s own environment, never touching the WebEngage Cloud. Our platform only processes behavioural and non-PII attributes, while personalisation happens securely on the customer’s premises via the WebEngage Agent.
With the focus shifting from customer acquisition to retention, what strategies are fintechs in this region adopting to stay competitive?
We are seeing more and more MENA fintech companies move from campaigns to journeys. Instead of running bursts of acquisition, they’re wiring always-on flows around onboarding, activation, credit usage, savings habits, and renewals. That shift alone has improved their unit economics.
We also see more behavioural engagement, such as responding to missed payments, salary credits, failed KYC attempts, or changes in spending patterns. These signals can be far more meaningful than demographics.
In today’s “milli-second economy,” how do WebEngage’s tools enable hyper-personalisation for fintechs and digital banks?
WebEngage ingests live events from banking cores, wallets, and apps, stitches them into real-time profiles, and uses AI to decide the next best action in that exact moment. For a digital bank, that could be recommending a credit top-up, sending a fraud alert, or nudging a savings goal, based on what the customer is doing right now and what their long-term behaviour suggests.
Because our infrastructure is elastic, this intelligence holds during peak load days like salary cycles or mega-sale periods. The customer simply experiences it as a bank that “gets” their context without being intrusive.
How can fintechs in Saudi Arabia and the UAE personalise their services to cater to both underbanked populations and affluent digital natives?
Both groups can sit on the same platform. The difference lies in the playbooks you build on top of it. For underbanked segments, personalisation is about trust. That could look like vernacular messaging, education-led nudges, lighter onboarding, and alternative data signals to reduce friction.
Affluent digital natives expect the opposite. They want proactive insights, lifestyle-aligned offers, real-time rewards, and a level of convenience that feels almost concierge-like. When fintechs unify their data and design separate journeys for each cohort, they can support inclusion and deliver premium experiences without duplicating infrastructure.
What are the key challenges fintechs face in the MEA region when it comes to customer engagement, particularly in terms of compliance with data regulations?
The biggest challenge is still data fragmentation. Many fintechs have core banking, CRM, wallet systems, and contact centres that don’t talk to each other. Without a unified, compliant customer profile, personalisation becomes difficult and risky. The second challenge is regulatory diversity. UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Egypt all have different expectations around data flows, residency, and consent. Fintechs operating region-wide need stacks that can adapt country by country without rewriting everything. And finally, skills. Teams are still learning how to blend legal, security, and marketing perspectives into one workflow.
How are fintechs aligning their customer engagement strategies with the goals of Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030?
They are shaping their engagement strategies around the same pillars Vision 2030 focuses on, namely digital excellence, financial inclusion, and ecosystem growth. We see institutions using data-driven education journeys for first-time borrowers, SMEs, women-led businesses, and young professionals.
They’re also broadening their product ecosystems, using engagement tools to surface insurance, investments, and bill payments inside unified apps. That aligns with Saudi Arabia’s push to build multi-service digital platforms. Most importantly, fintechs are investing in Arabic-first, culturally aware experiences, which strengthen trust.
How does WebEngage help BFSI firms in the region build compliant, scalable customer retention strategies?
We usually start with the foundation: what should a unified, compliant customer profile look like, and where should it live? Once that’s agreed, everything else, from journeys to AI models, sits on that blueprint.
Our CDP architecture is modular and designed for regulated industries. That takes away a huge amount of operational strain from banks. From there, teams can scale from a handful of journeys to hundreds, without revisiting governance every time. Retention becomes a repeatable system.
How do you see the martech landscape in the Middle East evolving over the next 3–5 years, particularly for fintechs and banks?
We’re heading into a composable era. Banks don’t want all-in-one suites anymore; they want flexible CDPs and engagement layers that slot into their existing cores. AI will also become industry-native. Models trained specifically on BFSI behaviour, such as credit cycles, risk, and regulatory constraints, will outperform generic engines. We’re already seeing evidence of this across our deployments.
And finally, agentic AI will become the quiet game changer. Instead of manual segmentation and journey creation, teams will supervise AI agents that propose cohorts, write message variants, and run controlled experiments.
How critical is it for fintechs in the Middle East to have compliant customer engagement and data analytics platforms, and how are they ensuring this?
It’s the foundation of trust. One mistake in data handling can take years to repair, especially in markets where regulators move quickly. We’re seeing teams involve compliance and security from day one when evaluating platforms. They want clarity on how data flows, where it sits, and how consent is honoured and audited. A platform like ours helps because the compliance controls are built into the engagement layer. When the technology itself enforces good data hygiene, teams can innovate with freedom.
With the UAE’s push for open banking, how are fintechs adapting their customer engagement strategies to align with new regulatory frameworks?
Open banking is giving fintechs access to richer, consented transaction data, and that’s changing the nature of engagement. Instead of pushing generic offers, many are moving towards advice-led experiences like spending insights, savings nudges, and product recommendations based on a person’s full financial footprint.
At the same time, it raises the bar on data stewardship. Customers must know what they’re sharing, with whom, and for what purpose. So fintechs are tightening consent flows and increasingly moving towards frameworks with revocable permissions.
What does the future hold for customer engagement in the fintech sector in Saudi Arabia and the UAE? What trends should we expect in the coming years?
First, AI-driven decisioning will become the norm, and every customer interaction will be context-aware and outcome-focused.
Second, engagement will move beyond the bank’s own app. With embedded finance, fintechs will need to interact with customers inside partner ecosystems like mobility apps, marketplaces, telcos, and even smart devices.
Third, agentic AI will take over much of the operational work, from segmentation to content to journey design, and teams will guide the strategy while machines handle the execution. And finally, regulators will start valuing good engagement as consumer protection. Clear communication and responsible product guidance will become part of what “good finance” means in the region.