Muslim Money Talk
Introducing the Muslim Money Talk Podcast, a place for all things Muslim and Money related.
Every week we'll be sitting down with Founders, leaders and industry experts from across multiple disciplines to discuss lessons learned, mistakes made and most importantly 'How they did it?'.
Brought to you by Kestrl: The Muslim Money App, software to help Muslims grow their wealth without compromise. Find out more here: https://kestrl.io/
Muslim Money Talk
Battling Islamophobia In Silicon Valley: Abdul Haseeb Basit (and Mystery Guest?!) Ep. 50
Episode number 50!!!
We’re joined by Abdul Haseeb Basit, cofounder of Madinah Angels to discuss Islamophobia in the startup ecosystem, prompted by controversial comments from a top VC partner, and explore how Muslim entrepreneurs can build their own spaces and funding networks. They also delve into the origins and growth of Madinah Angels and the Muslim CEOs Dinner series, aimed at empowering Muslim founders.
This podcast is hosted by Areeb Siddiqui, the founder and CEO of Kestrl, the app that helps people to grow their wealth without compromise
Find out more about our app here: https://kestrl.io/
And how we help banks here: https://business.kestrl.io/
Show Notes
00:00 - Trailer and intro
02:20 – The book that changed his career
04:49 - Mystery guest arrives
07:21 – Growing up nomadic and pilot dreams
11:36 – Career in banking (working with Areeb’s dad?!)
15:06 - Islamic Finance Impressions and moving to FinTech
18:08 – Ethical vs. Islamic branding: lessons for founders
24:05 – Why Islamic fintech will outpace Islamic banks
29:28 – Islamophobia in Silicon Valley and start-up culture
35:31 – Madinah Angels: Vision, first deal & founder advice
44:11 - Web3, Stable coins and the future of Islamic fintech
48:31 – The Muslim CEOs Dinner: building community & collaboration
54:41 – Legacy, supporting Muslim businesses & global impact
1:01:22 – Closing thoughts & next steps
So Sean Maguire made a tweet. He said Mandani comes from a culture that lies about everything. It's literally a virtue to life. It advances his Islamist agenda. The West will learn this lesson the hard way.
Speaker 2:He started off the conversation with saying are you an Islamist? What does he mean by that? Quite honestly, that was the first time I'd heard the word and I just went. What the hell is that? He ended the conversation by saying I'll be really pissed off if I, if I go down in a plane, uh, with some terrorists on it and you know nowadays if that was a baffling conversation.
Speaker 2:Post 9-11, uh, the mood music changed and before no one really noticed that you were Muslim. We all know the statistics about how bad it is for minority founders to raise. At the same time, we're told there's so much capital in the Muslim you know community, especially here in the UK and America, and so Medina Angels is just our attempt to bring Muslim angel capital and apply it to Muslim-led startups.
Speaker 1:Before we begin, we actually noticed only about 10% of you are subscribed to the podcast. So if you like what you're listening to and you want to hear more from us and see more things Muslim and money related, then please consider subscribing and, of course, leaving this episode a like and share it with your friends, leave us a comment or a review, because it really really does help us out and help more people to find us. Thank you. Now back to the show. In today's episode, a very special one, it's number 50.
Speaker 1:I'm really pleased to have a very special guest to match up to it Abdul Hasib Basit. He's the co-founder and principal of Ellipsis, which is a research and advisory firm, and venture builder in ethical fintech. He's also the co-founder and chair of the Muslim CEOs, responsible for the very successful Muslim CEOs Dinner series, and the co-founder of Medina Angels, an angel syndicate made up of Muslim investors looking to invest in Muslim-owned startups. We're going to be talking about everything from some of the backlash and what's been going on in Silicon Valley due to one of the biggest VC partners actually weighing in and making some horrifically Islamophobic comments, all the way to why it's so important for us to build our own spaces and networks. So, as always, I'm your host, arif Siddiqui, and this is Muslim Money Talk.
Speaker 1:Abdul-aziz, welcome to the show. As-salamu alaykum, thank you for having me. Wa alaykum as-salam. It wasn't easy to get you. I think the only way was we should probably address yeah, I mean, do you want to tell your viewers why I'm really here? Well, seven months ago you lent me a book I did Stressing on Lent, the Problem with Interest, by Dariq Al-Dawani, which is a very famous and hard to acquire book these days because there's only very few in print edition. You very kindly lent this to me, I think December last year it was November and you've held it hostage since until I appear on the podcast.
Speaker 1:Until you appear on the podcast. So here you are.
Speaker 2:So I'm glad to finally get it back.
Speaker 1:So here we go, the hostage exchange.
Speaker 2:Thank you thank you Probably poorly worded, so it's quite an influential book. I think this started my journey into Islamic finance, or exploring Islamic finance.
Speaker 1:Was it this?
Speaker 2:book. It was this book. It was actually. It was this book and some of Tarek's earlier work we did a.
Speaker 2:YouTube documentary. We did a documentary which somebody ripped onto YouTube and I managed to find it. It was really my first introduction to Islamic finance. It's when I was working in banking and it really got me switched on to the concept of Islamic finance and exploring it more deeply. It's one of these things where you know his body of work has affected so many people in the industry and switched on so many hearts and minds to Islamic finance.
Speaker 2:May Allah you know, give him the benefit of that. And this book is really hard to come by because it's no longer in print, so I have a couple of copies. This one circulates amongst friends. Your brothers read it. Other people have read it.
Speaker 1:Nobody's quite held on to it for as long as you have. I did offer to give it back a few times.
Speaker 2:I'm just joking. I'm really pleased that Tarek is actually writing a fourth edition now.
Speaker 1:This is the third edition and it should be coming out this year, inshallah, I think, in september, october time.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I had a had a dinner with him or lunch with him last year where I had two objectives. The first was to convince him to write another version of this book because it's no longer in print.
Speaker 2:Um, uh, he, I think he finally agreed after me and a few other people um kind of you know, suggesting he should do that but, he's one of these people that, strangely, I always had access to in random ways so I had come across his work, managed to meet him through other people in Islamic finance at conferences during COVID, managed to get him on a podcast for one of our non-profits and, I think you know, ended up during covid sitting alongside him at uh east under masjid and we've just been joined by uh somebody, somebody else oh, we're a server chair for you over here.
Speaker 1:You're supposed to be on that side. Sorry, I know you were maybe expecting. Why was there a third mic? I was curious as to why there was an open chair, but it makes sense now.
Speaker 2:This is the wrong edition we know we've just been discussing it literally announced there's going to be a fourth edition.
Speaker 1:So for people who don't know, we're rejoined I think for the fourth or fifth time on the podcast by Omar.
Speaker 4:Khalil so Aslam Ali, welcome back to the show. Long time no see the. Muslim CEO of Manchester is next week. I think you've got the wrong date. Yeah, yeah, I think I should. Yeah, I'm sorry, I wasn't expecting to see him today.
Speaker 2:So it's nice, nice to see him here.
Speaker 1:I was about to say, you and I are two people who've survived a very peculiar, peculiar kind of I was going to say natural disaster, but that is Omar Khalil. We come across him quite a lot in our day-to-day lives.
Speaker 4:Can't get rid of me.
Speaker 1:Can't really get rid of him. That's very true actually so I thought it would be nice to someone that you face off with so often one of your co-founders to have him as like a co-host on this episode.
Speaker 4:Oh, you didn't introduce me as the founder of Muslim Show Collective. Introduced me as the founder of Muslim Shia Collective. But people know that about you. No, this guy, he just organizes dinners. He's very good at it. Joking aside, he's an absolute asset to the community, mashallah.
Speaker 1:We were literally just talking about how the next edition of this is someone you've always had access to.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I sat next to him at Jummah in East London Masjid during COVID. I ran into him at a Palestine march with him and his family and you know, that's when I really sort of took the initiative and said, look, we need to sit down, we need to have a proper chat. It's been a while and it was around the time that Omar and I were speaking about a number of initiatives and we both had this idea that you know, he should be writing another edition of this book and I think through collective hounding, he's agreed and Inshallah will be coming out soon.
Speaker 2:So if anyone who hasn't read it and can't get hold of a copy, or can't borrow mine because Areeb's had it for six months, I encourage you to buy the book when it comes out, because I think it is possibly the best economic, religious, social argument for Islamic finance ever written.
Speaker 4:I actually just came to pick up the book.
Speaker 2:You have had it for four months and not read it, so hopefully you'll be back to read it in six months.
Speaker 1:I did. I did for sure. So, before we go into everything that we wanted to talk about, I always ask this question of our guests but did you envisage that this is the line of work you wanted to go down growing up or when you were at school, or at university.
Speaker 2:No, not at all. Rarely, not at all. My daughter calls me a plane geek because I'll be looking up at the sky and I'll kind of point out what airline, where the plane's probably coming from, what model making plane it is.
Speaker 2:I had a fascination with planes growing up, and I think that's probably from an upbringing that was quite nomadic. So for the first 10 years I was born in the UK. When I was six months old, my parents moved to Saudi. For the first 10 years we spent three in Saudi, three in Pakistan, four back in Saudi, and then eventually came back to the UK when I was 10. Wow, even then my dad stayed on in Saudi for another six years, I think, and so there was a lot of flying around the world. What did your dad do?
Speaker 2:He was a doctor, he was a retired surgeon. And as a Western educated doctor in the 80s Saudi was quite an attractive place when they were investing in their hospitals and medical schools, and so a lot of Muslim doctors who were Western educated found it quite an attractive place to go and raise family Nice, similar to what you see now, with people sort of you know, migrating to the Middle East for lifestyle, and it was really only education that brought us back to the UK. So you know when we hit a ceiling with.
Speaker 1:English language education in Saudi. We decided to come back to the UK. Was that quite a culture shock coming back here at age 10?
Speaker 2:No, I think, because I mean, on average, I was moving around. I was either moving school, city, country every three years, so it was always like an adventure. So I was always really open-minded about going places and it was a culture shock in many ways coming to the UK. It was the first non-Muslim country I'd you know. Probably in many ways coming to the uk it was the first non-muslim country I'd, you know, probably had a memory of living in.
Speaker 2:Uh, so there were aspects of it that were, you know, kind of uh took me back a little bit, especially in the sort of late 80s, early 90s. Um, but you adapt. I came here with an american accent, lost it very quickly after being bullied at school for having an american accent.
Speaker 1:So, um, you know you, you adapt to these things I think, okay, nice omar once said it to me quite well, he said our parents generation grew up being bullied and your generation grew up being the bullies we started doing the bullying it was.
Speaker 4:It was quite horrific in our parents generation here. First immigration, parents, first immigration. The parents came to the country, um, if you look at the industrial revolution, um, you know there were very few brown colored or non-white colored people in the schools and therefore it was like this is this is odd, and you know, there was a whole skinhead culture and I used to hear about it and I thought, wow, you know, my, my, my uncles and my father would tell me stories about how they would get bullied after school and picked on and physically beaten. And then I realized what, when we went to school, is that, is that going to happen to us? And we saw a different form of it and because we were aware of that, we weren't willing to take it, and so therefore, a small number of people in many uh, you know, non-muslim populated demographics and schools were just not willing to take it. So therefore they end up fighting back.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I think I was, I'm probably, I probably sort of halfway in between those generations are probably your parents' generation and your generation, so I kind of straddled both. So I had experiences of of both, of having that kind of physical and verbal bullying. And then you know, seeing how Asian communities kind of you know, fight back.
Speaker 1:Do you think that's impacted what you do now? Because obviously so much of what you do whether it's Muslim CEOs, whether it's Medina Angels is all about building a space for our own community right now. Do you think that was always something you were trying to look for?
Speaker 2:I don't think I was necessarily trying to look for that.
Speaker 2:I mean like you know, as I was saying, you know I grew up thinking I was going to be a pilot and you know that never really happened. I went into a degree that was kind of business focused at uni and ended up being very good at maths and accounting and becoming a chartered accountant. I think that kind of aspect of what I do now in my career has been shaped over many years through many different instances. There's no, there's no one trigger for it, but there's there's certainly a few that stand out. Hmm, okay.
Speaker 1:So I was about to say I was about to continue, but then I realized you actually worked with my dad.
Speaker 2:I did Back in the early days.
Speaker 2:Yeah, my first job in banking actually um back in new york it was melon at the time before it merged with bank in new york yeah, and we were part of melon international, which was the, the non-us arm of the bank, headquartered in london. Um, I worked there for a year. Um, it was an interesting experience, my first job in financial services. I started off in media and qualified as an accountant there, moved into financial services and your dad was, you know. Like I said, he was sort of half a generation ahead of me and was one of the first senior Muslim people that I encountered in any organization and you know he had his corner office on the same floor as me and I did work with him.
Speaker 2:I was kind of his. You know he was head of audit. I was kind of his accountant for his team. You know he was head of audit, I was kind of his accountant for his team. But you know we'd go into his office we'd have like a cursory five minute conversation about work and then just talk about life and our experiences. And you know he was he was he was quite forthcoming with how to kind of navigate these kind of spaces where you don't necessarily fit in um is there anything you can share?
Speaker 4:how old?
Speaker 2:was a reeb at that point. A reeb, I think, was probably still in school at that point, 2005, 2006, around then.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I was 14, 15, but I would come to the office so I did my first I did my summer internships there. So that's when the idea of Kestrel started brewing.
Speaker 4:It did not, 100% did not.
Speaker 1:I would just like be told okay, you can sit next to this person and don't bother them and go buy them lunch.
Speaker 2:Probably a little bit after my time there, so I moved on after a year to to credit suisse, so I got ahead okay fine for a roll out there and uh, but yeah, that that there was actually quite a lot of um, good muslim brothers in that in that organization at the time. Really, uh, we used to all go for jumma together. Yeah, um, you know, during during, during ramadan, we used to, you know, uh, you know, sort of support each other with fasting. A couple of the brothers you know went on to do fantastic things. Of course, your dad is your CFO now. You know we had a brother who was the founding CFO of one of the UK Islamic banks.
Speaker 1:Oh really.
Speaker 2:Who was on the floor with us? Who?
Speaker 1:was it.
Speaker 2:Another brother who is now a trustee of RFM.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I was going to say say, you know, the real credibility in the industry is if you've worked with Areeb's dad, because I have a trustee who also worked with Areeb's dad, and they all. You know it's like this trump card. Oh, by the way, yeah, I worked with Areeb's dad. I'm like, okay, you're telling us now, so like if you haven't worked with.
Speaker 1:A was very late and I would have been even later had he not, you're the man.
Speaker 4:It was nice to see him. It was nice to see him on the way, so, um oh, you bumped into him already yeah, he dropped me here, oh nice yeah, it was literally because I've got to, I've got to get a flight after this so anyway, that's why I was running late, so apologies again.
Speaker 1:Um, but what was I saying? So you worked with my dad. Can you share any of the advice that he gave you back then, or is it kind of not for podcast?
Speaker 2:sharing. I don't think it's a public consumption, but it was um. It was really about you know how to unapologetically be yourself and really um you know, not hide your faith yeah um, and I think that was.
Speaker 2:It was the first time I'd ever heard that one. I heard that from anyone senior, uh, anyone muslim, in an organization previous organization I'd worked with. There there were some Muslims around, but, you know, not in senior positions and you know very few and far between. But getting into financial services, there's a lot of us, you know. It's like, I think, like your dad said in his podcast, you know, going into professional vocation, like you know accountants, you find a lot of Asians, a lot of Muslims in those fields.
Speaker 2:So you find a lot of Asians, a lot of Muslims in those fields. So there was just a lot of us in that kind of finance team.
Speaker 1:Okay, Okay. So then you moved on from there and I think where I first met you was when you were running. Was it Ellipsis at the time?
Speaker 2:No, so I did about eight years at Credit Suisse, where I was kind of in technology strategy, private banking, and then, having had my fill of kind of conventional banking and you know where tarik's work comes in is, you know, switching me on to islamic finance. I started exploring islamic finance I while I was at credit suites. I did an mba and focused on, you know, islamic private equity as my specialist area. It's an area I was quite interested in, uh, with the you know the likes of fudger capital launching at the time, and through the connections I'd made that you know people that went into islamic finance space, um, I found I couldn't really find a place for myself in islamic finance. The practice and the theory of it were a little bit, um, uh, sort of dislocated for my liking, and so I didn't really feel like I could jump into Islamic finance and think that I'd made a significant move in the right direction.
Speaker 1:What do you mean? The practice and the theory weren't really matching up.
Speaker 2:So the theory of it you know completely agree with and you know, very well, aligned to having studied it, the practice and what I saw banks actually doing. And I mean I've sat in offices of ceos, cfos, and looked at contracts that islamic banks are doing and I've asked them to explain to me how it's sharia compliant and they'll give you the party line and then sort of later on they'll kind of admit yeah, it's know, it's kind of doing it by crook, not, you know, by hook or by crook.
Speaker 4:I mean, this is the part not to edit out.
Speaker 2:And so that for me, didn't sit right and look, I don't have anything against Islamic banks. I think they've done a job in getting the industry to where it is, and it just so happened that at that time, where I was a little bit confused about whether Islamic banking was the right place for me to go, I got an opportunity to get into fintech and I had this tech and finance background and fintech was evolving in 2014. And there was an organization being set up called Innovate Finance, which was the UK's fintech body trade association, and you became the CFO. I became the CFO, I was there from day one and helped build it up over three and a half years and that really got me into FinTech and, in a very strange way, the Islamic finance space started coming to me and going. I was a Muslim guy that understands FinTech and we want to get know about FinTech, so Islamic banks started contacting me. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Government, development bodies and financial centers from Middle East started contacting me. I, development bodies and financial centers from the Middle East started contacting me. I ended up doing the first session ever at the World Islamic Banking Conference. That was on fintech. We had the likes of Yielders Wahid Arabesque pitching. They gave us the graveyard slot right at the end of day two and now everyone talks about fintech in every Islamic finance conference.
Speaker 1:When you first set up Innovate Finance, did you ever imagine that one day Innovate Finance would hold a pitch competition which an Islamic fintech would win?
Speaker 2:No Well, I was involved in kind of building Pitch360 as part of the conference at Innovate Finance. I never imagined that you'd walk in.
Speaker 1:We didn't imagine we'd win either we weren't the first Islamic fintech to pitch.
Speaker 2:I never imagined that you'd walk in. We didn't imagine we'd win either. We weren't the first Islamic FinTech to pitch. There were others that came through and pitched in previous years, but you're the first to actually win it, I'll send you a picture.
Speaker 1:If you just put the picture here, we'll show you. But yeah, alhamdulillah, last year we were lucky enough to be invited to pitch and we applied, got through and we were one of 10 startups that pitched and we actually bizarrely won which I wasn't expecting and I had nothing to do with it, because I left many years ago.
Speaker 1:But yeah, alhamdulillah, it was really interesting for the first time to see an Islamic fintech pitching alongside conventional, and I think that was so key for me in my thinking, where it was like I think sometimes the Islamic label is very damaging for fintechs and financial services companies and that immediately in people's minds you're relegated to a niche which isn't quite fair but at the same time, it doesn't impact you, especially when it comes to fundraising, which we're going to move on to.
Speaker 1:But that's why what we're doing with Kestrel now we see it more as the kind of ethical fintech instead of just islamic on its own and just focused on the islamic market, always inherently sharia compliant, but branding wise.
Speaker 2:We're not just going for the muslim market so this, this debate about ethical versus islamic comes around every few years and you know having been in the space for now a decade, I've seen it come around three or four times already, and there are people that think, you know, we should be branded islamic with an arabic name and do what it says on the tin, and there are those that say, no, it should be for a wider mass audience. Um, I don't think either is right or wrong, necessarily.
Speaker 2:I think it depends on the, on the, on the solution and the objectives but I, you know, my belief is that you should always have Islamic principles and it should be underpinned by that. But if you're doing it right, it should be applicable to the mass market. It should be available to everybody. It should do a better job than the conventional alternative for everyone.
Speaker 1:Yeah, for sure. I think Sheikh Mohammed Baracha put it really well when he appeared on our podcast a few weeks ago. He said he thinks the biggest mistake Islamic Bank of Britain made was calling themselves Islamic Bank of Britain, and he said he wished that they had focused much more on hey, this could be a way of sending foreign direct investment into this country, because then they would have got far more support at governmental level and also from the public, instead of saying we're just setting it up for this little community of muslims in that way. So, but I take what you mean. It really depends on what you're trying to achieve and what you're trying to do for us. I think the face of ethical now is really aligned to the bds movement, which I think captures the hearts and minds of not just muslims but loads of non-muslims these days as well yeah, that's a that's an interesting one, right?
Speaker 2:because you know the the boundary of what's ethical can change, the boundary of what's islamic can't really change yeah, um, but islamic today doesn't encompass bds. There's no standard that exists in Islamic finance that covers BDS, or I think you're.
Speaker 1:You're one of the pioneers in the space our last episode was all about we had halal stocks, rehan.
Speaker 2:Ahmed, who was? Talking about this a lot, yeah, so there are others appearing and there are BDS screens now that you can apply especially for things like stocks, but as a general kind of principle it doesn't really exist in Islamic finance.
Speaker 1:Thank you for listening to Muslim Money Talk. If you like what you've heard so far, you might be interested in checking out what we do at Kestrel, the Muslim money app. Kestrel is a service that helps Muslims who want to grow their wealth without having to compromise, whether it's on their belief or user experience or price. I founded Kestrel because of how fed up I was at how poor Islamic financial services were in this country. Often people didn't use them because of how bad the user experience or customer service and indeed, how high in price they were. So Kestrel was the answer to that. If you download the Kestrel app today, it can help you by creating a budgeting plan. Plug in whatever bank account you have and it will create an auto budget just for you. You can then tell us what goals you're saving for, and we'll save towards them automatically into pots and then, crucially, link you towards Sharia compliant investment and savings products as well. So download Kestrel today and try it out for yourself.
Speaker 1:Now back to the podcast. Yeah, so in our digital bank, what we'll be doing is, if you spent a certain company, like a certain fast food company with golden arches as its logo, we'll just highlight. Listen, this is how they're involved in certain activities. Here's an alternative Go chicken cottage instead, for example. So that's just kind of the beginning of certain things we can do with it, I think the only thing I'll just add there, sorry, just quickly is Abdullah Sibi is absolutely spot on and it's about we know Islamic finance is not going to change.
Speaker 4:It's about bringing ethical in line with Islamic and it's important that the gatekeepers of this industry are able to articulate its true value. And one of the key things that obviously often comes up a lot is the ethics and conduct. It's okay having an Islamic finance product right. But if the corporate culture of the organization is ugly, that also is not permissible, right, that doesn't slide. So I think there's a whole myriad of issues here that needs to be solved. For example, you know organizations which obviously they're not sugar compliant anyway. There's loads of BrewDog came up in the news recently, right, about how they treat their employees and stuff like that, and you know it's not a good example but, it was so visible.
Speaker 4:And so we see this sometimes in some of our organizations. We've got to be open enough to frankly admit it, to say how can we improve these things? So I think we've got to you know.
Speaker 2:Absolutely.
Speaker 1:I agree, I agree, absolutely so what mistakes do you see, because you've seen so many fintechs come and go within this industry? Yeah, what are the same mistakes that you see being made over and over again, and how should we be avoiding them?
Speaker 2:mistakes is an interesting one, because I think you know if you, if you look at an entrepreneurial ecosystem for a few, to make it a lot, have to fail yes that's just the nature of entrepreneurship, your global islamic fintech reports, the last number of 495 islamic fintechs, 495 islamic fechs.
Speaker 1:And your colleague Connor put it quite nicely where he said you can't have 495 apps on your phone, absolutely. So there's got to be mergers, there's got to be failures, there's got to be yeah, and we're already seeing that right.
Speaker 2:So we saw that with Manzil and Agaz in North America. We see that with Sam and yielders recently here in the uk. Uh, so consolidation is going to take place and I think that's only right. I think, you know, each organization gets to a level where they can't scale further. Um, that's either a function of capital, which we'll talk about. Um, it's a function of uh, you know their, their capacity, certainly in regulated spaces. You need certain volume to be viable as an organization in a regulated environment, and those are the challenges that a lot of these Islamic fintechs face. So consolidation is one answer.
Speaker 2:I'm sure there are others that haven't yet emerged that will help propel these forward. But I think what's interesting for me is, you know, with that background and not having found a place in Islamic finance, getting into fintech has found me a place in Islamic finance and I'm actually very bullish on Islamic fintech as the next generation of evolution within Islamic finance. I think most of the innovation that we are going to see in Islamic finance, it's not going to come from the banks, it's going to come from the fintechs, and I think that's you know, that parallel could be drawn with conventional fintech. A lot of innovation from 2014 onwards happened within the fintech space, for sure, and it really forced the banks to change.
Speaker 1:It did. It had to drag the banks kicking and screaming into the future just to keep up, because they were losing customers.
Speaker 2:And, and I think Islamic banks haven't fully caught on yet to that extent, but they are starting to. Yeah, inshallah.
Speaker 1:Okay Well, are you seeing the same thing, Omar? Yeah Well, look. You think we're scaring the Islamic banks enough. I don't think so.
Speaker 4:We're scaring. What I personally this is my personal feeling from, also from an RFP perspective is how we can grow this ecosystem to be river free in essence Right and system to be river free in essence right, and obviously there's different. That also becomes very subjective, which is fine. Um, I would actually like to see the bank, so the islamic banks, um be more proactive and say, actually, do you know what? There's a? There's some really interesting propositions that exist. We're going to actually put capital into them, or you know, or some sort of gesture, because we, as an industry, you know we're. If you look at the size of our industry, it's still fairly small.
Speaker 1:There's a lot of work to be done, but I really do feel that the solutions going forward are going to come from fintech, as abdul hasib highlighted right you have a really good relationship with some of the banks right, we do have some really good relationship with some of the banks uh, bank islam in malaysia, bank muhammad we're working with, we've done stuff with emirates islamic and Allied Bank in Pakistan, so, yeah, quite a few other players. So we do, and I really think that the Islamic banks have the capital, the fintechs have the motivation and the distribution capacity. So it's hopefully a match made in Jannah.
Speaker 2:So we did do this at Innovate Finance. We looked at the conventional banks and we actually you know the team coined it the sort of the fintech playbook, right? So what? The strategies that banks can adopt to participate in fintech and there were nine things that we came up with, and I'm not going to do it justice and remember all nine off the top of my head, but it was things like corporate venture capital, it was things like partnering, it was things like incubating your own ventures within the bank, and we saw conventional banks, you know, across Europe and the US, adopt that and be very successful at it For sure. What we haven't seen is Islamic banks do that to the fullest extent.
Speaker 2:It's actually a piece of research that I'm really keen to do on Islamic banks globally, but it's a hard one to do right now, because the level of activity has to be there for us to be able to benchmark it.
Speaker 1:At Kestrel. We've done a few of them. So Allied Bank Limited in Pakistan did a hackathon, which we won that. Emirates Islamic Bank did one as well. We won that one as well.
Speaker 2:I'm not just trying to… I think you need for next season's podcast. You need all your trophies on the wall.
Speaker 1:Maybe we should do that. What else the banks in Malaysia? They're kind of tied in with the FICRA accelerator. So FICRA is run by Malaysia Digital Economies Group. So MDEC and a lot of them participate in that accelerator. I know that the guys in. Uzbekistan are trying to do some stuff now as well. So there's like a similar accelerator, so these groups do exist. There's not often like a lot of money involved in that and there's not always a promise of deals, but I think it's the beginning.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think I think it's more government-led. Yeah, um, it's for uh, for those economic development bodies like mdec who've been a you know supporter of our research in the past on design, fintech, gutter financial center, who are still a supporter of ours Fintech Research and Qatar Fintech Hub. These types of initiatives are really there to attract fintechs to the country, get the banks to participate, but the onus from the banks themselves can be lacking sometimes in certain jurisdictions. And I think that's the bit that needs to evolve.
Speaker 1:That needs to evolve. So I want to move on to the headline, which I think will probably be the headline for this episode, but it's all about a tweet that came from one of the leading partners at Sequoia. Sequoia is one of the biggest VCs in Silicon Valley, so Sean Maguire made a tweet, I think it was over the weekend, where he said and this is alluding to Mandani, who is I think he's not the mayor of New York, but he's the main candidate for it.
Speaker 1:And he said Mamdani comes from a culture that lies about everything. It's literally a virtue to life. It advances his Islamist agenda. The West will learn this lesson the hard way. So for a lot of us in the startup space not just fintechs but in startups it was crazy to hear and it was kind of not surprising because since October 7th we've seen so many people in the VC space kind of come out and show that they're really much on one side of this argument rather than the other. But it can be really disheartening when you're building something and you think that, oh, you know, I'm building. This is my livelihood. Politics isn't going to come into it, but very much does, especially when you see a tweet like that, which is so it seems, so racially focused and so islamophobic. Is that kind of what motivated you to start what you're doing now with medina angels?
Speaker 2:yeah, so I think it goes back to my sort of earlier experiences, um, when I was working for a media company, um, um, you know, we we had a, a guy who was quite senior.
Speaker 2:It was you know, everyone looked up to him. He's one of those that had kind of qualified as an accountant and made it into the business side and it's a path that many of us wanted to follow and I think I was eventually ended up being the third person to do it after him. But you know, we all saw him as a bit of a mentor. He's a little bit older than us and saw him as a bit of a mentor. He's a little bit older than us and you know, I think your dad talked about this in the podcast said you know, there's, there's a, there's a pre-911 version of you and there's a post-911 version of you. And I was there at that firm when 9-11 happened. Post-911, uh, the mood music changed and before no one really noticed that you were muslim, uh, but all of a sudden, you know when you're fasting, when you're out with the team and you're not drinking, um, when you're, you know, taking prayer breaks, um, you know I just want to see your name.
Speaker 1:It becomes yeah and your name becomes noticeable.
Speaker 2:right, and you know we can talk about the, the kind of the random selection at airports that all of us experienced, um, but you know, the this guy, he called me into his office and I thought it was just a, you know, standard sort of meeting and he started off the conversation with saying are you an Islamist? What did he mean by that? Quite honestly, that was the first time I'd heard the word and I just went what the hell is that? And it took me a while to you know kind of go and Google it and read what it was and where it came from. And there was a book out at the time that you know was kind of touting this term, that he'd read. And you know he just said I just want to know, are you an Islamist? And I said I don't know what that is right. Are you asking me if I'm Muslim? You know I was a little bit confused. It was a really weird conversation.
Speaker 4:And he ended the conversation by saying I'll be really pissed off if I, if I go down in a plane uh with some terrorists on it and you know nowadays that was a baffling conversation, that's insane. I think it was 2023 24.
Speaker 2:That was your line manager. He wasn't my line manager, but he was my senior right, okay, what year was this? Uh, this would have been 2003, probably 2004 somewhere around there you know, nowadays, of course, that becomes an hr issue right straight off.
Speaker 1:Well, you think that, but then you see comments like this being made. So at the time.
Speaker 2:You know I never experienced anything like that before. Yeah, entirely baffled by that conversation um and uh. You know there's been instances like that throughout career, right?
Speaker 2:so where your face doesn't fit and if you don't go drinking with the team, if you take prayer breaks, um, if you're gone for a little bit longer on a friday lunch time, uh, you're fasting, yeah, during ramadan. You know these kind of things mark you out and you know it's led to things like not getting promoted because you're not seen as a team player, right, whatever that means, and you know it's not a it's not a sob story.
Speaker 2:I mean, we've all experienced it. So when things like this happen, I'm not entirely surprised, because to me it's been there for 25 years. It's not that it's not been there, it's just maybe been hidden better than it is today. Now I think people are a bit more emboldened with kind of right-wing views and feel like they have cloud cover to come out with these kind of statements. But but, it's always been there. It's not new and you know it's just racist. That's simply what it is. It's stereotyping someone because of their ethnicity or their culture or their religion. That's entirely what it is and what's you know.
Speaker 2:What's even more interesting now is, like you say, there's 800 VCs that signed an open letter in support of basically not Palestinians a couple of years ago and, to my knowledge, none of them have retracted that. Even given what's happening today, you have comments like this coming out. I think a thousand um tech entrepreneurs signed a letter, yeah, to condemn these comments. I think we were on that and yeah, you were. And you know, more recently, a hundred or so tech entrepreneurs have signed a letter in support saying no, it's not racist. It's actually a well thought out argument. So these people exist.
Speaker 2:You just have to navigate a space where they will exist. They will always exist.
Speaker 1:But what was heartening was that it wasn't just you know, ics is like little startups here in the UK. They were the founders of Unicorns in Saudi, like the CEO of Kareem, the CEO of Tabi, which are billion-dollar companies in their own rights, who put their names on that list the list condemning what he had said, but even still still, I think people on twitter were saying, oh, look at these guys. Their total market cap is less than a hundred a hundred dollars, um, which is just complete ignorance on their part well it, it goes down to your value system, right?
Speaker 2:what do you value is? It your morals and ethics, or is it your valuation? Yeah I know where I'd rather stand.
Speaker 4:Yeah, well said.
Speaker 1:Is that the strapline for Medina Angels?
Speaker 2:Medina Angels, I think, is a distillation of a lot of things. I think the Islamic fintech research that we do and you and I have spoken about this before one of the key challenges that we find in the research when we interview and survey entrepreneurs, is access to capital is the biggest challenge for Islamic fintechs and you kind of expand that out to others in the Islamic economy minority founders. We all know the statistics about how bad it is for minority founders to raise. At the same time, we're told there's so much capital in the Muslim you know community, especially here in the UK and America and in places like that, we should be funding our own. You know tech entrepreneurs, and that's great. Both those things are true, but those mechanisms don't exist. So, you know, I sort of when I come across a systemic problem that really bugs me, I can't really let it go until it's solved, and whether it's me solving it or someone else, so to me that was right. That's that needs solving.
Speaker 2:And so medina angels is just our attempt to bring muslim angel capital and apply it to muslim-led you know tech tech startups, and so we have just done our first deal. Congrats, it's a UK reg tech, thank you, called Reg One. I think you might have met the founder at one of our Muslim CEO dinners and yeah, he's a great guy. I've known him for six years. I met him at level 39 back in the day and it's a great story of a Muslim founder domain, specialist in his area, his post revenue, six know six figure ARR and killing it. And that's exactly the kind of founder that we want to be backing and you know, inshallah, we're closing out the first deal and we hope to do many many more.
Speaker 1:inshallah, yeah, inshallah, inshallah. Amazing. So what's the vision for it? Do you want to become a full blown VC? Do you always want to run it as an angel syndicate? And for people who don't know, an angel syndicate is basically a collective of high net worths and angels, people who want to put some money into a pot and then you'll bring in deals for them to then determine whether they want to come in on. That's how it works.
Speaker 2:Typically what happens with an angel syndicate is you have a lead angel who sources the deal, does the due diligence, presents it to the other angels. The lead angel normally takes a 20% carry on the deal like a VC would. We're not doing that, we're investing. So as lead angel. I'm investing on the same terms as everybody else. No other upside other than if the other angels make money, I make money.
Speaker 4:No preference shares.
Speaker 2:No preference shares at all. The angels make money, I make money. No preference shares, no preference shares at all. Um, of course we're gonna. You know, we will back any muslim-led tech startup that fits our profile, as long as they're not in sort of, you know, sectors that we wouldn't invest in. Um, and, yeah, the the idea. Eventually, we would love to be a fund. Uh, we'd love to actually reinvent the fund model using, you know, more islamic economics. Um, which I don't think anyone's done yet. Um, but in order to do that, you have a, you have to have a track record, you have to build the experience, and so this is this is our way of building our track record okay, with muslim-led tech startups there's a lot of founders who listen to this.
Speaker 1:They're going to be thinking how can I reach out, how can I apply? What are you looking for in a founder? So what we're?
Speaker 2:looking for is somebody who's not um not predominantly a first-time founder. So either you have, you know, done something entrepreneurial before, uh, or you have some, you know, significant domain expertise in what you're doing. Um, we like to see that you're not uh, you know pre-mbp. You're, at least, you know, launched um as a tech startup. Uh, if you're post revenue, that's great. That D risks it for us and there's some other fundamentals that we look at as part of our due diligence. But ultimately, we're looking for people that have, you know, large, addressable market, sensible valuations and are doing something that we think is impactful any particular sectors you want to focus on?
Speaker 2:no, so we're not focused on FinTech necessarily, even though our first one is a fintech. We're not necessarily focused on Islamic economy either, but as long as it's not in any sectors that we would avoid, Amazing.
Speaker 1:Okay, seriously, man, it's been much, much needed for a long, long time. So I was so, so happy to hear when you made the official announcement on Muslim Tech Fest.
Speaker 4:I know it's been going on for a while and, inshallah, the first of many deals couple questions for me. So is there a finders fee if I bring you a client?
Speaker 2:no, if you bring me a client. You need to become an angel, you need to invest.
Speaker 1:I've got one they're launching a digital bank and oh us, I was like wait, who else I think? Let's talk about camera.
Speaker 4:Then you know I can potentially bring your clients launching a digital bank. But, on a more serious note, do you feel I remember when I first met you and you always said to me, I don't know what my space in Islamic finance is, and I said, well, that's a bit of an odd way to look at it, because you're part of the industry. I always saw you as part of the industry. I way to look at it because you're you're part of the industry. I always saw you as part of the industry.
Speaker 2:I lean on you on some certain things as well, um, but do you think this is your calling because I know you're very passionate about the dc private equity space, right? Um, I mean, I I studied sort of islamic private equity as part of my mba because I was really interested in it and trying to understand the, the sort of the islamic finance models and things that were happening. Like you know, I researched the? Um, the islamic uh bond, um that was used to acquire aston martin by kuwaiti family office. Um, you know, looking at the, the models that fudger capital was deploying, uh, you know, when they first launched. So I was really interested in understanding what was happening and seeing how it could be evolved further. Um, and that that's led to some of my thinking. But you, I don't, I didn't really see this as a calling at all. I think it's. You know, it's interesting that the kind of people that you come across in your, in your work, and how they affect you right, your dad is one, lawrence, who's Lawrence Wintermeyer, who's my co-founder at Ellipsis. I met him. He came in as the CEO of Innovate Finance six months after he launched it and he and I have been working together for 10 years now and you know we launched Ellipsis together. When we left Innovate Finance. We built another nonprofit in the digital assets blockchain space. That's still going. We, you know, we built ventures together.
Speaker 2:Anytime I lose faith in the Islamic financeic finance sector, it's him, a non-muslim christian, who, you know, encourages me to go back and says no, this is your industry, these are your people, this is what you need to be doing. Wow, and everything we do, whilst it's ethical, you know, there's always, there's always a point where it's like right, how do we apply this to the islamic finance space? Right, what do we need to do to get Islamic banks involved, islamic asset managers involved? And so everything we do ends up covering Islamic finance as well. And that's largely down to him, because there's been two or three times where I've said it's too difficult, don't want to do it. What caused you to say that Friction, the friction of doing anything in Islamic finance? Know, had a few attempts at it and it's not always been plain sailing. Um, I think I'll probably leave it at that.
Speaker 1:I called umar once, I think after jumbo, just after there was a lot going on in the industry at the time and I was very disillusioned. Yeah, I'd grown very disillusioned and I just thought you know what, screw all these people, I'm just gonna have to do this on my own. Like I'm not for this collaborative effort. I just feel like people are paying lip service to the idea of collaboration and they're not actually going for it. And, um, I can't remember what you quite said to me, but you did make me feel a lot better about it.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I think it's uh, and this is one of the reasons why we sell muslim ceos is because the life of a ceo can be very lonely. That's quite a normal thing to encounter as a ceo frustration and friction, um, but it's also very poetic and and we don't sometimes realize that when we advocate for islamic finance principles and people get it, ie, that are not from muslim faith, because it's not a faith issue. You've got to talk about the economics of why these principles are fairer. You don't understand how it affects them, and that's why somebody like Lawrence and many others in the industry, right, richard Thomas is another one who really advocates for these principles, but they may not be from the Islamic faith or may not be from any faith, but they understand that these principles are more juster and fairer.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, and I think, think you know there's, I would say I would put umar in that category of people that have, you know, kind of positively influenced and nudged me in the right direction, right. So um, muslim ceos is another. You know, another thing that we started.
Speaker 4:That's our kind of main interaction that I pester you and annoy you about yeah, I mean it was.
Speaker 2:Look, we. You know we were talking about a number of things that we wanted to do individually, collectively. We were looking at an issue around payments, which is still one of those systemic issues that bugs me, that I'm still working on and trying to do something with, and, inshallah, we'll get there. That's your calling. I think that was probably close to my calling.
Speaker 1:Are you bullish?
Speaker 2:on stable coins. I am yeah. I think they have a real use case. I think what's happening in the crypto digital asset IPO space, with the likes of Circle IPO-ing this year, it's a huge signal. All the banks are switched on to the potential of stable coins. I think for cross-border payments, for settlement, it has a real use case.
Speaker 1:That's a clear, clear use case. But now we're seeing people talking about using stablecoins. Sorry for people who are not fintech-y, but it's a bit of a chance to nerd out on fintech. But people are saying that it's going to be the whole new framework and core banking standard could be built on stablecoins.
Speaker 4:Maybe tell them what a stablecoin is.
Speaker 1:A little bit more. Yeah, we should probably do that.
Speaker 4:How would you define a stablecoin? Oh, you've got a fintech specialist here.
Speaker 2:Go on. Well, okay, so put me on the spot. But a stablecoin is basically a digital asset. You know, sometimes called crypto, but wrongly, I think, called crypto it's a digital asset that is backed by another asset, and that can be fiat currency, a hard asset, or it can be a native digital asset as well. For sure, it can be things like gold, and so you will see these types of stable coins emerging. The most popular ones are fiat-backed stable coins at the moment.
Speaker 1:USDT, usdt. By backing it in that way and pegging it to a real asset, you get rid of the speculative nature that bitcoin often shows that you don't have the so I think I think people misunderstand why there's a speculative nature.
Speaker 2:Right, people say that bitcoin, as an asset class um isn't a store of value. It is a store of value, it's just not a stable store of value, right.
Speaker 1:So I think its main function is a store of value right now, as opposed to as a real currency?
Speaker 2:yeah, I, I think so too. But I think what people don't understand is the reason it's volatile is because you have an asset liability mismatch, right. All your liabilities are in fiat. For your assets sitting in crypto, you're going to have a mismatch, so you're always going to be fluctuating in value. So unless you get into a proper circular economy that is only on chain, only using that one digital currency or a number of stable coins, you're never really going to get away from that asset liability mismatch.
Speaker 2:In my mind as an accountant, that's the way I think about it. So, um, you know people that. Do you know gold back, this gold back that. You know nothing wrong with that as an investment asset, but it's not a payment asset, right? I think you have to decouple the two.
Speaker 2:So you know, when we first launched Global Digital Finance which was, you know, which is our non-profit in the digital asset space a lot of the early work in the first year was about taxonomy. It was actually about talking about digital assets with the same taxonomy, because you had regulators in the US, regulators in the UK, in Europe and you know, elsewhere in the world talking completely different languages somebody calling a stable coin, somebody calling your security token, somebody calling a payment token, and you know I think we were one of the first organizations to kind of you know, develop, you know taxonomy for describing all these things. It's evolved a hell of a lot since in the last eight years and I think there's a bit more uniformity to the way people address digital assets. But I think it's still very, very nascent as a sector. But the signals are there, like we saw with fintech, where the banks are now starting to pay attention. The banks are now starting to invest and utilize these mechanisms and I think that is the signal for it going mainstream, not just the banks.
Speaker 1:You've got Amazon, I think. Walmart is launching their stable coin. Revolut is already doing it. So yeah, I think it's coming, and I think the next cohort of Islamic fintechs should be focusing on that as well.
Speaker 2:Digital assets in our research is seen as the growth area for Islamic finance or Islamic fintech.
Speaker 1:Shout out to Takada and Marhaba. They've always been good friends of the show. Good friends of the show. Check out their episodes. It would be remiss of us not to talk about Muslim CEOs' dinner series here you haven't covered it yet. No, we haven't talked about it properly, but I love the founding story for it, where you talk about what you would do if you retired.
Speaker 2:Yeah, before we get into that, you've actually been to a dinner. I've been to a few. Yeah, You've been to a couple of dinners, right so rather than me talk about it? Why don't you tell people what your experience?
Speaker 4:was yeah, that's a good idea.
Speaker 1:So the first dinner I went to was the first one you did, which is where yes, you came to the very first one. Yeah, yeah tharik old the one.
Speaker 2:He was the guest of honor, so that was my second objective of that lunch I had with him. The first was to, you know, convince him to write he convinced him to launch it I actually guilted him into being our first guest speaker. I said I'll only I. You know, I sort of told him the concept and said I'll only do it if you agree to be the first guest speaker.
Speaker 1:Wow and uh, that's how you got him, because he's he's famously reclusive, so it's hard to get him out, but you need to get him on the podcast we do, which he's so far said no to. He says, yeah, let's go out for lunch, but I'm not going to do a podcast appearance, so I'll have to guilt him. I'll say we're going to turn off muslim money talk unless you come on inshallah, we'll.
Speaker 2:We'll support you.
Speaker 1:Get him on inshallah, we can um, so yeah, at the first dinner it was at the top of a restaurant in near covent garden yes, correct, covent garden. Uh, it was fully halal. We had like a private room to ourselves. I remember coming in praying usher in the corner. It was like almost exactly a year ago, I think, may it was may, yeah, may time may last year.
Speaker 1:Um, and then slowly, more and more of these ceos, all muslim men and women, started filing in from all walks of life. There were familiar faces, other people from the fintech sector or islamic finance, like najib. Najib al-aswad was there. Sadiq dorsad yeah, um, shiza, shiza was there yeah, perfect from up effect and she brought her little girl as well.
Speaker 1:Um, but also I met people like the founders of arb, which was like a modest fashion brand right which that. Those were spaces I've never been in before because I'm always so finance, islamic finance focused, so it's very interesting to meet muslim ceos from other walks of life, from completely other other industries, so that was cool. So it was about 25 of us in a room, all sitting round an L shaped table, and then we kind of did this thing where we went around the room Whilst the food was arriving, all standing up and giving our little stories some of us longer, longer than others.
Speaker 4:We were still refining. I wasn't actually that long that day. We were still refining, we got the short, umar Khalil Khutbah.
Speaker 2:That day, the shorter one the little 30.
Speaker 1:Minute bite sized version. It wasn't 30 minutes, but it was close. And then Tariq gave a keynote speech.
Speaker 4:He did, but you all had 5 minutes remember the key thing is that, in order to understand and Abdelaziz can chime in as well we give everybody five minutes to go and introduce what they're doing, based around three themes Number one, what is it that you're doing and why you're doing it. Number two, what is your impact on society? And three, what's your legacy? And then, that way, we unearth so many different gems within the community. Right For sure, and it's cross industry it is.
Speaker 2:And you asked about the backstory. The backstory was we were having conversations about lots of things and you know, I I think just casually in in passing mentioned I said you know, we were talking about how badly networked we are as muslims. Um, you know in business. And I said, you know, when I retire, I've always had this vision of you know in business. And I said, you know, when I retire, I've always had this vision of you know having a big dining table at home and just inviting lots of really interesting Muslim CEOs to dinner and you know, getting to know them and find out what they do. And you know, Omar, in his you know unique way, said you know, why are you going to wait till you retire? I'm not going to do the impression.
Speaker 4:That's what I was waiting for. Do the impression that's?
Speaker 2:what. I was waiting for I got a bad rating for the impression last time, so I'm not going to do it again. Not from me, definitely from you. He said why are? You going to wait till you retire? The need is now. It's urgent.
Speaker 2:So let's do it now and with everything. Like you know, with Muslim CEOs, with Medina Angels, I'm always of the opinion. I can talk about this till the cows come home, but let's just do one. See if anyone turns up, see if anyone invests, you know just, we surprised that people turned up so I was on a boy's holiday to marrakesh the week before I remember yeah we went hot air ballooning yeah, and you were messaging me.
Speaker 2:We, we landed and we got back on the, the bus taking us back to our villa and I was on. It was about an hour and 30 minute, you know. Ride back to, how do you get?
Speaker 1:away with a boy's holiday with a wife and kids.
Speaker 4:That's a different episode, we'll save that for another episode, but yeah, I was.
Speaker 2:For an hour and a half I was sat on my phone sending out emails to people because you know we had about half the capacity yeah, yeah and I got all sorts of responses from you know what is this?
Speaker 2:you know, yeah, why should we pay to come to a dinner? To who are you? How did you get my email To people that I actually knew and they just forgotten who I was. But you know, alhamdulillah, like you said, 25 people turned up to the first one and you know, we sort of anchored it around three pillars, which are connection, collaboration and legacy. I think some of that emerged over the first few dinners.
Speaker 2:After the first year, we held six dinners in three cities in London. Sorry, four cities London, bradford, manchester and Birmingham and we took a pause during Ramadan this year and we thought about what we wanted to do with the CEO's dinners and you know, alhamdulillah, we had a lot of supporters that had joined us through those dinners, who wanted to help and collaborate with us, and we formalized, as the Muslim CEOs, collective shout out to Zegham, who came up with the name, and, yeah, we sort of decided that. You know we wanted to go a bit broader. So we're doing 16 dinners this year, year being between Ramadan's, and we'll be doing more cities. We've already done leicester as a new city. We've got glasgow and newcastle in the agenda later in the year and what are you guys getting out of this?
Speaker 1:because you're not running this as a business no, it's running as a non-profit as a cic um, so it basically washes its face.
Speaker 2:People pay for their dinner and you know we cover the cost of the meal?
Speaker 4:the simple answer is pleasure the pleasure to meet other ceos and founders and connect with them and build a community that we know is very much needed. It's not about making money yeah it's about creating those you know, gelling ceos together to say look, you're not in this alone. Together and based on our principles and way of life. It's about creating our own tables where we're comfortable to discuss whatever we want to discuss.
Speaker 1:That's simple and I think the pinnacle of it was what you did in the run-up to muslim tech fest at palestine house, yeah, where I think you had was it 100 people, 60, 60 people? Okay, it felt like a lot more for some reason, but there were so many people there in this incredible environment at palestine house and hoban, which has been constructed from all of these materials from palestine itself. Um, and I think that was really cool seeing all of these people who come from all over the place, even internationally, just to be there at this dinner series that you created.
Speaker 2:Did you ever imagine? It?
Speaker 1:was going to get to that point.
Speaker 2:No, not at all. You know a few dinners in. We were already getting demand from like Paris, washington, new York, riyadh, Dubai, jeddah you know places nairobi for people you know, for us to come out there, and I think it's a bit more than we can manage. Uh, I think even 16 in a in a year across the uk is quite a lot.
Speaker 2:We're doing two a month, right, yeah, outside of sort of december and a few months where we don't, where we don't hold dinners, but um, I think you know that's the the one we did in the run-up to MTF. I think is really the pinnacle of what we set out to do. It's bringing, as Omar said, bringing CEOs together, getting them working together. We try and live that ethos through Muslim CEOs. Web developers that we use, the restaurants that we use, the photographers, videographers that we use, the podcast people that we use We've used your guys as well, uh amir uh, so uh you know, uh, we, we try and work with other muslim businesses um, you know, support what they're doing
Speaker 1:uh bring them into the fold um to non-muslims listening? Yeah, they might ask why? Why do you want to just use muslim businesses? Why don't you want? To integrate more and and do all of that. So it's not about. It's not about not integrating, I mean integration is not our problem.
Speaker 2:Our problem is we don't work well together. Um, I think you alluded to that in your kind of you know crisis of islamic finance that you had, um, when you spoke to umar. Um, you know, if you look at the kind of statistics around, you know, the circular, the circularity of the Muslim pound I think you may have discussed this on your podcast before is the amount of times it circulates within the community is significantly less than it circulates within other communities, faith-based and non-faith-based communities, and so what that means is we don't automatically think about uplifting our brother or sister through business, and this is something that we're trying to engender within our community, and the reason we chose Muslim CEOs and founders only and we didn't open it up to a broader audience is we are looking for decision makers, we are looking for people that can affect change in their own businesses, and this is why we do it. We're trying to. You know, like I said throughout this podcast, there was a few things in your career that kind of, you know, switch you on to the right things or push you in the right directions, little nudges in different ways, and this is our attempt at nudging people into, you know doing things slightly different way and you know, alhamdulillah, the most.
Speaker 2:You said. You asked what do we get out of it? It's not financial for us. I mean, it builds our network right. So, as you said, my network was in financial services. It was predominantly London based. There are plenty of successful entrepreneurs, ceos, businesses in other parts of the UK that are not in financial services, that I had no idea about, and now I'm starting to network within that space. So it's useful for my own network as well as everyone else that attends.
Speaker 2:But what's really heartening for us is and this is why we do it you know, a few weeks after dinner I'll get an email from somebody or a text message saying oh yeah, I met so and so at your, at your dinner in in Birmingham or in Manchester or in Leicester or wherever, and yeah, we're doing this together. Or you know we've we've signed this partnership and you know we've signed this partnership and you know people are starting to collaborate and work together and that for me is you know that for me in our second year is a phenomenal place to be. Well, it really is. And the final bit is legacy, right. So we encourage people to think about our legacy. I don't think we've yet coined what our own legacy from Asim CEOs is going to be but we're still developing it Well.
Speaker 1:I'm excited to see what the next year holds.
Speaker 4:And maybe going to be, but we're still developing it well. I'm excited to see what the the next year holds and maybe we should bring you back for episode 100. This is episode number 50. I'm privileged you had to wait for a landmark, didn't you?
Speaker 2:I didn't even know it was a landmark, so I walked in the room.
Speaker 4:So but inshallah yeah we'll come back and uh so we have uh a muslim seo dinner next week uh wednesday, the 16th of July this episode comes out on the 14th, so it'll be this week. So so we have a CEO dinner in Manchester next week, this coming Wednesday, and we have one at the end of the month in Birmingham. So next week in Manchester, sorry, this week in Manchester and at the end of the month in Birmingham. So if anybody wants to join, tickets are selling fast go to busimceoscom register, buy your ticket here's the other thing.
Speaker 4:People have to register because they're getting a little bit confused, because it's a private community, so we are very selective. They've got to be the right fit, ethics and conduct have got to be there, and so once they've registered they get approved by the LASEIB and then once they're approved and they're on there, then they can book dinners and you guys have a whatsapp group now we have a whatsapp community.
Speaker 2:We have a linkedin community. You can follow us on linkedin as well.
Speaker 3:Muslim ceos collective and uh yeah, we've had over 270 ceos now attend dinners wow across the country okay and like you said, you know the one we did in mtf.
Speaker 2:We had people from ceos from aust US, Canada, Europe, from Palestine Sweden attending, so it was great to bring that kind of global community together.
Speaker 1:Yeah, shout out to Pontus. I'm sorry you've not been on the podcast yet, but we will make it happen. All right, I think we're going to have to wrap it up there for time, but, abdulhasib, it's been an absolute pleasure. Omar, we'll see you probably next week on your next appearance on the show.
Speaker 4:I think I should tender my resignation from Muslim Money Podcast for now, because I've probably done too many episodes and Ali will get a bit upset. Have I done more? You've done more than Ali.
Speaker 2:Oh, that's fine you've been on more than Ali just don't bring Ali on, otherwise I'll have to come on again. I'm just going to make sure I take this so that I actually have it to take home there you go and assalamu alaikum. Wa alaikum assalam.
Speaker 1:Thank you for listening to the Muslim Money Talk podcast. If you like what you heard, then please subscribe to Muslim Money Talk. Wherever you might have been listening to this, give us a like and share it with someone who you think might be interested. It really, really helps us out. Thank you, assalamu alaikum, and see you.