Mozn is a technology company based out of Saudi Arabia. The company uses the power of AI to innovate and build products and solutions. Its flagship product FOCAL is an AI-powered risk and compliance platform that is used by banks, insurers, and fintechs. The company is present in Saudi, and the UAE, and has a strength of over 250 people.
At LEAP 2024 in Riyadh, Mozn is not only announcing a slew of partnerships but is also working to stand out as one of the top AI platforms in the region.
In a conversation with edge/ Malik Al Yousef Co-founder and Chief Operating Officer, spoke about the expansion and growth plans of the company.
What does Mozn do and what problem does it solve for?
Mozn is one of the leading enterprise AI companies in the region. Our mission is to basically use technology to improve digital humanity. We focus on basically two areas. One is on building the best performing Arabic LLM model and technology. And the second area is around risk and compliance for financial services. So through these platforms, we have empowered more than a hundred customers across the region from a range of industries including leading government organisations, banks, financial services, and fintechs.
Why did you start Mozn? What problem does it solve for?
We basically started by going to the largest organisations and understanding the pain points that they’re facing in making their own decisions. And from that, we use their own data to help them understand how they can make better decisions using AI.
And this in turn has led us to understand the problems that organisations are dealing with when it comes to Arabic data and making use of the Arabic data to enrich their knowledge and make better decisions.
From there, we saw a similar trend in the financial services sector where legacy solutions were catered towards English-speaking organizations and the performance was not optimized when it comes to solutions such as watch screening.
Is there a particular reason as to why you decided to start Mozn?
One reason is seeing the trends. First there is high aspirations within the regional sectors, look at Saudi or even the UAE, they have very ambitious plans when it comes to national growth. And from that, we saw that the current solutions that exist are lacking especially with data and AI. So we built our company to be the leading AI hub in the region.
Mozn wasfounded by industry leaders and veterans. We come from a technology background, having worked at the management consulting with McKinsey, and previously studied at Stanford and MIT.
Tell us about the announcements you have made at LEAP?
This isthefourth year that LEAP. And we’re proud to have been in every single edition of LEAP. This year, we have multiple launches that we have. First is our most accurate Arabic LLM engine, which we’re demoing at Leap. Next, is our financial insight solution FOCAL, which is our risk and identity platform for financial services.
We have just announced our partnerships with Google Cloud to avail FOCAL on Google Cloud’s marketplace giving it a global expansion.
Can you tell us a little bit on Focal and OSOS and also on a bit on your anti-money laundering and fraud prevention work in the region? How does the technology work now?
FOCAL is the leading risk compliance platform in the region. The platform uses AI to solve for major use cases, including AML, anti-money laundering, and fraud prevention.
We take a customer’s life journey approach to addressing risk and compliance and use AI to prevent financial crime. Especially when it comes to especially digital interactions in which there is no face-to-face interaction between the FI and the customer.
Tell us about the adoption of AI in the MENA region. According to you and your experience, what has it been like, what do you expect from the region?
We see huge ambitions across the region, honestly, and a huge acceptance of wanting to use emerging technologies to be basically to have more prosperous nations in their own economies.
We have seen large interest in adopting AI to improve, to automate processes, to make sure that citizens get the best services, as well as to make better decisions and have better insights for the human analysts to make better decisions.
We see a growing demand and growing potential for AI and we see this, you know, economies and the largest enterprises here wanting to work closely with the AI innovators.
