Blog on The 2020 Middle East and Africa Summit (MEA), by Matthew Gamser, CEO SME Finance Forum

It was my great pleasure to reconnect with the Milken Institute after more than 10 years away from their very unique and stimulating gatherings. This time, I attended the 2020 Middle East and Africa Summit (MEA) held in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates, on February 11-12. I’d only attended their sessions in Los Angeles before, so it was another pleasure to see the additional elements involved in a regional event, which was only minority-share American!  

As always, the meeting is eclectic, following Michael Milken’s diverse interests in finance, healthcare, entertainment and sports – with a new focus on food this year. While I was brought in for the finance side, it didn’t stop learning from the discussions of vertical farming entrepreneurs, retired sports legends like Didier Drogba (who should be remembered more for bringing peace to Cote d’Ivoire than for his immense accomplishments in football, see picture), and of the crème de la crème of private equity leaders, such as Rajeev Misra, CEO of SoftBank Investment Advisors, who runs the Softbank Vision Fund, a venture capital firm specializing in growth capital and late-stage startup investments. (Picture: Didier Drogba, Ivorian retired professional footballer, Nicolas Anelka and Clarence Seedorf, along with boxer Wladimir Klitscho, special guests of the 2020 MEA Summit.)
  
Financial participant, versus an enabling environment creator
I was involved in two panel sessions, most deeply in the first panel where I was joined by three leading venture investors, Chris Rogers of Lumia Capital, Nabeel Koshak of Saudi Venture Capital, and Jamie Levy of the Abu Dhabi Investment Office. The panel focused on what government policy initiatives are most appropriate for catalyzing entrepreneurial development.  The discussion centered mostly on the extent to which government needs to be a direct financial participant, versus being an enabling environment creator, and how to figure out the right balance.  A tough topic, and not one lending itself to a cookie cutter answer all countries.  However, I believe this is very relevant for development banks like IFC, as we also need to consider what investments crowd in the private sector, and what might crowd out.  We also talked about what sorts of policy initiatives are most important, ranging widely from tax, to information, to insolvency, to education, - even to cultural change to raise the value of an entrepreneurial path.

The second panel I participated actively in was about fintech in the Middle East and Africa, where I learned of very interesting work Milken Institute is doing, comparing government approaches to promoting fintech ecosystems in the Middle East. There were a number of really interesting and SME relevant fintechs representatives  including: Talal Bayaa of Bayzat (insurance and HR services for SMEs), Serge Tohme of Finastra (bank MIS), Navin Gupta from our old friend Ripple (cross border payments) and Carl Wazen from Yoco (payments in Africa).  I was very pleasantly surprised that talk wasn’t all about fintech for the one percenter (wealth management, algorithmic trading, robo-advice, etc.), especially in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region, where governments seem to be aggressively competing to be THE fintech center. This is tough for them, but good for innovation, and good for SMEs in the long run!  

It was also a great pleasure to hear Dr. Shen Jian Guan of our SME Finance Forum member JD Digits talk about the future of the Belt and Road Initiative. Dr. Shen helped to correct some misunderstandings about the objectives of this initiative, lessons learned to date, and likely future directions. It was very useful to have a globally engaged platform like JD contributing to this discussion.

On a different note, the occasional downside of being part of this eclectic event is that, in order to get your delicious sit-down lunch, you have to sit through a lunch program including Paris Hilton, the “Billion Dollar Entrepreneur”, and Deepak Chopra! Though both living in the same country in which I am based, they are far more alien to me than any cultures and ideas here in the Middle East!

The 2-day event gave me many new contacts and ideas to follow up on.  Thanks, Milken Institute, for bringing me to Abu Dhabi to reconnect with your very interesting work!