Fintech News UAE had an in-depth conversation with serial entrepreneur and investor Yefim Oks.
In the interview, we discussed what shapes the fintech of tomorrow, from AI to the role of regulation, the convergence of tradfi and defi, and the vision behind his latest venture.
Nowadays, Yefim says, the fintech market is experiencing the biggest shift since the emergence of online banking.
“We’ve entered a phase where traditional financial institutions either evolve or fall by the wayside. The reason is simple: the user demands speed, transparency, globality, and maximum control over their assets.”
At the same time, technologies require extreme scaling speeds, which is virtually impossible with legacy architectural approaches.
AI as a Part of the Infrastructure
Yefim noted that AI ceased to be just a support chatbot or marketing gimmick.
Instead, it’s becoming a bank’s second operational system, performing real-time fraud detection, automating AML and compliance, shaping personalised offers, contributing to risk scoring, and optimising operating costs.
“Banks that haven’t embedded AI into the core of their processes are starting to lose out. Not on the interface, but on the cost-to-income ratio.”
Yefim sees AI as a new way of running a financial business, and not a separate function. It enables faster-than-market scaling, while maintaining risk control.
The Real Economics of Fintech
Commenting on the economics of fintech, Yefim also points out that most new fintech projects remain unprofitable for the first five years.
He adds that this is rarely discussed, even though customer acquisition costs (CAC) are constantly rising and zero-fee services have become industry standards rather than differentiators.
“Transactions no longer generate revenue. Instead, it comes from additional services such as lending, BNPL, wealth management, crypto products, and B2B solutions. The winners are the apps that are first to establish a sustainable and scalable unit economics framework,”
says Yefim.
Intense competition drives fintech players to create useful and powerful products, often following the same core principles. They create the cheapest and most competitive conditions to gain a chance of standing out in the market.
This results in a shift of the fintech model.
Current Trends and UMO
Discussing the development of the financial industry, Oks highlighted the main trends: the convergence of banking with crypto, process automation through AI, and the rise of new digital banks centered on UX and personalisation.
Drawing on these trends, Yefim and his team came up with their current project.
“UMO – a project we’re building in the UAE — emerges precisely at the intersection of these trends and demonstrates what next-generation finance ought to be.”
He added that banking as we know it is a thing of the past:
“The traditional banking model is fading. Success now goes to products that can assemble a whole ecosystem of dozens of services, including core banking, KYC, AML, custody, trading infrastructure, crypto processing, cards, and instant payments – all working as a seamless, unified system.”
It raises a fair question: why can’t traditional banks with their vast resources be as agile and user-friendly as today’s fintech solutions?
Here’s how Yefim answers it:
“The majority of legacy banks are built on 20-30-year-old technology stacks, making these systems extremely difficult to scale and develop. It can take 5-7 years to rewrite the core, and migrating millions of clients to a new system is a CEO’s worst nightmare.
A lightweight, modular, and scalable architecture built from the ground up is far more efficient. Such systems can accelerate to incredible speeds and handle massive loads.”
In this context, Yefim compares Europe and the UAE, saying this works on the state level as well. In Europe, you may face bureaucracy, which often holds progress back. UAE, by contrast, is a very progressive country, the leader in tech implementation.
The country’s modern digital government, swift regulatory processes, and 24/7 large-scale development enable the UAE to become a leader in multiple industries simultaneously.
He says this was one of the main reasons why he and his team chose the UAE to launch the project.
The UAE has quite strict regulations regarding financial providers, but Oks believes that the idea that strict regulation stifles innovation is erroneous.
In his view, in mature fintech, regulation becomes a competitive advantage and a protective barrier, and jurisdictions such as the UAE, DIFC, and VARA don’t create a restrictive environment but provide a structured sandbox with clear rules of the game.
“Within 3-5 years, the market will separate into players who can develop products aligned with regulators and those who simply won’t be allowed to scale. Regulatory compatibility is becoming a part of product architecture, rather than a legal afterthought.”
Tradfi & Defi: No More Rivalry
Over the last years, the relationship between crypto and traditional banking has shifted from rivalry to collaboration.
Decentralised platforms are introducing bank cards, banks are expanding into custody and tokenised assets, and regulators are formalising crypto-specific rulebooks.
At the same time, stablecoin payments are challenging SWIFT on speed and cost.
For Yefim Oks, this convergence is a part of UMO’s strategy:
“At UMO, our long-term vision is to build a regulated experience where eligible users can access supported fiat and virtual-asset services in one product environment, subject to the required regulatory approvals.”
he says.
Looking to the future, Yefim Oks outlines the key trends as the integration of regulated crypto infrastructure into banking products, which enables global users to manage both fiat and digital assets seamlessly from a single platform.
Edited by Fintech News UAE, based on image by bunditinay via Magnific
