When Norbloc was founded in 2016, it took a few years to find its feet. Headquartered in Sweden, the data expert, specializing in know-your-customer (KYC) technology, set out to sell its digital wares across western Europe.
“In our early days, we worked with banks in Sweden, Norway, Belgium and Greece, and found that not an awful lot of financial digitization was going on,” says the firm’s chief executive and co-founder, Astyanax Kanakakis. “Banks were very sceptical about working with each other, even though they are symbiotic in many ways.”
So, the following year, it switched track and headed to the United Arab Emirates, opening an office in the Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC), the region’s main financial hub.
At first, things moved slowly. The firm worked on a digital pilot scheme with a dozen or so local and regional banks – but again it developed slowly, bearing little fruit.
Then came its big break. In early 2019, Norbloc was approached by DIFC and Dubai-based Mashreq Bank. The two had a specific aim in mind: to create a digital ecosystem able to share the KYC data of corporate customers, seamlessly and securely.
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