Swiss Banking For All: IWM Zurich's Mohamed Lebda

As a natural people person with a love for numbers, Egyptian-born Mohamed Lebda found a perfect career in private banking, where he spent 12 years between banks like UBS and Citi, serving customers across emerging markets. In November this year though, he became an entrepreneur when he launched IWM Zurich, a fintech that helps clients open a Swiss bank account on the same day, with no minimums required.

The Zurich-based fintech, which also has a partnership with Mastercard, draws heavily on both Lebda’s long experience in banking and artificial intelligence (AI) – and, frankly speaking, human intelligence – to offer clients in emerging markets the opportunity to diversify out of their home economies.

IWM Zurich came about after Lebda encountered a pain point that consistently came up when he worked in private banking, which was the frustration of affluent clients from emerging markets like Egypt who didn’t necessarily have the US$1 million minimum deposit – or multiples of that – required to start a relationship with a Swiss bank.

As he researched further, he realized that it was not just affluent Egyptians who were struggling, but also others in emerging markets. He thus set off to create a startup that gives them access to a service that is normally reserved for the ultra- wealthy, thereby helping them redistribute their wealth.

“I built IWM because I saw a massive segment of hardworking people who are denied offshore banking, because they’re not big enough," Lebda explains. "And if they get access, they are not given the right attention. The core of the problem is that for people to open a Swiss bank account, the bank needs to understand their source of wealth, especially when they’re coming from emerging markets, which are considered the highest-risk markets.”

So, what does IWM Zurich offer? A bank account that can be opened on the same day with no minimum balance required, with the assistance of a relationship manager (RM). Once clients fund the account, they are charged a one-time fee, and then, a recurring monthly fee.

“Our monthly fee is less than Netflix,” he tells us. "I think the biggest difference between us and traditional incumbent providers is that, because of the rigorous amount of compliance that is required, RMs are pressured to extract as much value from clients as possible, so they push them on the amounts to be sent. They thus push them to invest, sometimes under the threat of closing the account if they’re not investing, or if they’re not sending enough. And this, over the past 15 years, has made the process of offshore banking such a pain to many of our clients.”

But how did Lebda manage to get a Swiss bank on board with his fintech? “With all humility, my background and credibility mattered a lot when I was speaking with banks,” Lebda replies. “Being part of two of the top 10 banks in the world for more than 10 years in different markets, gave me an understanding of what clients go through, bank’s rules, and what the regulator wants. And when you speak the language of the risk and compliance officials, they like it, because everyone wants to grow, but you have to do it compliantly.”

To safeguard against bad actors, the team at IWM also checks clients’ names against sanctions lists and with the international police organization Interpol, and it also conducts other international checks to answer the question of why a client’s net worth is what it is.

According to Lebda, it is a combination of experience, due diligence, and small alterations that helped his team shorten the process, without compromising on due diligence. The team is also utilizing AI to augment different team functions in order to deliver to its clients.

“The advancements that we are seeing now in building a product and software with AI are things that I wish I had earlier in my career,” he continues. “Remember, the core of the problem is the amount of rigorous manual work, and AI really helps here, because an AI model can extract the source of wealth, ask for documents, parse these documents, verify the information, and finally let you know if these would have a high probability of being accepted by compliance after listening to a conversation. And we’re just scratching the surface. AI is making the compliance officer and the investment advisor more efficient. But at the end of the day, it is a well-trained human who decides.”

This article first appeared in the December issue of Inc. Arabia magazine. To read the full issue online, click here.