 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021, brought to you by IBM. Well, welcome back to theCUBE and our IBM Think Initiative and today a fascinating subject with a dramatic shift that's going on in the Middle East and specifically in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. There is a significant partnership that has just recently been launched called Saadri, which is the Saudi Arabian real interbank express. And it basically is a dramatic move to make the kingdom cashless. And IBM is very much at the center of that. With me to talk about that role is Haji Sisei, who at IBM is the MEA head of payments, which of course is Middle East and Africa. Haji, good to have you with us all the way from Dubai. Good to see you today. The pleasure is all mine. Good, well, thank you for joining us. And let's talk about this initiative. First off, the problem or at least the challenge that IBM and its partners are trying to solve and now how you're going about it. So let's just paint that 30,000 foot level, if you will, then we'll dive in a little deeper. So if you look at the country, Saudi, the kingdom of Saudi Arabia in particular the region, Middle East and Africa, we have very cash driven society. And this provide lots of challenges in terms of government point of view, businesses point of view, and even the consumer point of view. The cash transaction is becoming less and less more trustable. You are less likely to see where the cash is going, where the cash is coming from. Maintaining the cash also is becoming more and more expensive in terms of security, in terms of recycling the cash, holding the cash, transacting the cash. All of that has been taken into consideration and the kingdom of Saudi Arabia with the help of the Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has a visionary vision 2030 to be put in place that would enable them to revolutionize the entire financial sector. As a segment within that called the FSDB, the Financial Sector Development Program. And that program within that program, they have a goal to develop a digital platform that will enhance and enable the society to go to a more cashless society and also help define a full end to end digital KYC environment for the kingdom. So when you think about the scale of this, I mean, it's almost mind blowing in a way, because in many cases, we've been talking about with various of your colleagues at IBM, different initiatives that involve an organization or involve maybe a more regional partnership or something like that. This is national, right? This is every banking institution in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, businesses, government entities. I mean, if you would share with me some of the complexity of this in terms of a project of that scale and trying to bring together these disparate systems that all have different kind of legacy overhang, if you will, right? And now you're trying to modernize everybody moving toward the same goal in 2030. I think it's mind blowing. Yeah, it is, it is John. And if you look at the complexity, if I may speak a little bit about how complex it is, let's start with the team. The team has been a full diverse team. We have 10 different nationalities that we have, team from America, Canada, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, UAE, China, UK, Pakistan, India, I mean, you name it. We have the whole globe pretty much every single region, Australia also was there. We had the team of that magnitude. In addition to that, as you rightfully stated, we're not building a system for a particular company or a particular industry. It is for the entire country, all the banks of Saudi Arabia, the 11 national banks and the 12 additional international banks that are there. The global corporates such as the Telco corporation, the oil corporation that are there, all of them needs to be onboarding into this, including the 17 million or 20 some million population that are there. Now, the key success factor that we have is that our partners, Mastercard and Saudi Payments, we have mandated ourself not to divide our 73 teams. We have to go with this as one single team. This was the module of the project. This is what made us successful. We didn't differentiate between IBM, Mastercard, or Saudi Payment. We all went together and addressing every single challenge as a team with the three different layers. And that's what helped us becoming successful in this engagement. So let's look at the initiative specifically then in terms of the technology that's driving this. We talk a lot about the digital transformation that's occurring in the world. And again, it's kind of a catch-all phrase. But this truly is almost this magical transformation that you're going through. So how did you address the various workloads? What's going to be done where and how and by whom? And then this integration that has to go on with that. Not only are you centralizing a lot of these functions, but you also have to distribute them to institutions across the kingdom. So if you would share a little bit of insight on that. So if you look at the architecture that we have put in place, it's really a very agile and flexible architecture in a way that we have put a central entity, which is the payment hub that will handle all the payment solution that is there. And we put the flexibility for all the consumers because we have different banks. If you look at the banks industry, we have banks that are very mature, banks that are on the medium level of maturity, and some that are absolutely not mature at all. And with this solution that we have to get involved, we have to be eyes of 222 enabled, which is the new language that Swift will be using. Now, the infrastructure that we put in place have enabled that flexibility. Otherwise, we're never going to be successful. You cannot come to a conference and everybody needs to be onboarded into this language. Everybody needs to be operating this way. Now, that will never going to work. We have taken that into consideration. From the beginning, we knew this would be a challenge. And we put different tools within IBM that we have put in place in order to mitigate those, such as the WTS, which is the website transformation exchanger, that enables us to transform messages from and to Azure 222, or from to Azure 222 to any type of format that the customer have. And here, the customer will be the banks. So we encapsulate that. Another challenge that we have is on the onboarding aspect. A lot of banks, again, depending on the maturity level, we have to be ready with different environment for them to catch up with us. Not everybody will be able to onboard on the same time. So by leveraging our RTVS solution, the Rational Service Virtualization, it enables us to mitigate, to virtualize an entire ecosystem, make it look like it is a physical environment for the banks to use as a testing, as opposed to, in enormous circumstances, purchasing additional hardware, additional software, additional component in doing that. Here, we're just virtualizing it for those who are ready for a system testing, those who are ready for a performance test, those who are ready for any type of non-functional requirement testing aspect. So these tools and this mechanism have helped us with our complex system integration methodology to mitigate this complexity and make it easy for the ecosystem to be onboarding and making it successful in this deal. You raise a really interesting point in terms of the maturity of different levels of technology within the banking institutions there. You've got, I'm sure, as you pointed out, some very small enterprises, very small towns, very small institutions, whose systems might not be as sophisticated or as mature, basically. So ultimately, how do you tie all that in together so that there might be a very large institution that has a very robust set of infrastructure and processes in place? And then you've got it communicating with a very small institution. You've got to be a great translator, right? I mean, IBM does here because you don't have them sometimes basically talking the same language, literally in this case. Yes, absolutely. And this is really our forte. We are the system integrators of choice in this region. And this goes without saying because of our platform and our processes and our people that we put together. If you look at this example again on the integration layer, we have enabled two lines of communication, two channels for the community. They could either go for API if they are very mature, or they could go through MQ, which is a low level of, I would say low level, but in the old fashioned way of communicating. So on that aspect, not only do they have two protocol to get to us, they can use any message format that they want as long as we agreed and we have an end check on the language that they're gonna be using. And this integration layer, the system integration that we have built up enables us to have flexibility on both entities. So this was just launched. I mean, literally just launched. What's your timeline in order to have full or I guess reasonable implementation? That's a great question actually. The average is 24 to 30 month. We have broken the world record. We have implemented this magnificent solution within 18 months. It's actually 17 month and a half of implementation. With the scope that we have, that is onboarding all the banks, having deferred net settlement, having the ISO 20022 billing solution on it. We had the, we had the billing, we had the dispute management, we had the single proxies, we had the debit cap and limit management and the portal solution. So we have all of that components within 17 and a half month. This breaks the world record of implementing an instant payment solution globally. What we'll call Guinness and get you in the book then. How about that? It is a remarkable achievement really is. Well, and you've talked about some of the values here in terms of reduced transaction costs, greater stability, greater security, greater transactional relationships. I manage a market liquidity, right? In your thought, I mean, tie all that together for our viewers in terms of impact and what you think this kind of partnership is going to create in terms of changing the way basically financial services are delivered in the kingdom. So it will change a lot and the impact in the economy, like I said, it's going to be on a three, four. One from a consumer point of view, you'll be able to save time and making your transactions. You will be able to trace your transactions and being able to have enough data to understand how you're managing your budget and your transaction. From a business point of view, you will be able to save yourself from theft. I mean, again, having cash in your business will intend to having more people coming and stealing them from you, either your employees or your customers or anybody else, but having a cashless business, nobody can literally steal your money. They can only steal your phone or steal your gadget that you have for that aspect. Managing and maintaining cash also is a big problem. Now from a government point of view, this is where it gets very interesting, especially for Saudi Arabia, the taxation of the employees or the Zakat payment of it, the trustability of all of that and being able to trace it and being able to say, okay, how much tax you will need to pay by the end of the year without you doing the calculation, that information is already provided to the government. And as a central bank, the printing of cash, maintaining cash, storing cash, securing cash, all of those costs will be gone away. This is why the country wanna go into a cashless society. Well, it's a fascinating endeavor and certainly congratulations on that front. We're talking about real-time payments and really making a significant difference in how services are delivered in the kingdom. And Haji, I certainly have appreciated your time here today in talking about it and wish you all the best down the road. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, John, really appreciate it. All right, so we're talking about the journey to a cashless society in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia and what Saudi Arabia is doing and IBM is doing to make that happen. I'm John Wallis and thanks for joining us here on theCUBE.