In the wake of crises, we often find tectonic shifts in certain industries, driven by sudden and drastic changes in consumer behaviour and business sentiment. These often culminate in new platforms.
As a result of a surge in demand for certain products, services or revised pricing, an overwhelming number of companies and assets are mobilised to capture these new market opportunities. Think Airbnb, founded in 2008, or Uber, which launched the following year. Both created on-demand platforms to allow individuals to monetise their idle commodities: cars, time and space. The advancement of technology has allowed us to consolidate commodities under one umbrella, called a platform, enabling users and purchasers to easily identify, negotiate and purchase these products or services, forever changing the face of the industry.
Suddenly, anybody with a car or a house – and a reliable Internet connection – could use these platforms to offer trips from point A to B or a holiday rental, opening up new and massive addressable markets in sectors that had been historically limited by regulation or infrastructure shortfalls. The aggregation of these commodities, coupled with the user-friendliness of the technology, created platforms that changed the face of their respective industries: transportation and accommodation.
New start-ups took these on-demand models even further to create platforms that tapped adjacent or expanded market opportunities. E-scooter ventures Bird and Lime built businesses serving last-mile mobility needs. DoorDash raised $2.5 billion for its on-demand food delivery service and Turo made it possible for people to rent out their unused cars via an app, altering forever the way we order food, and the think about logistics.
So what market disruption will come from Covid-19? I expect accelerated innovation and adoption of platforms that commoditise and digitise medicine, education and employment, amongst others.
The most obvious surge in demand has been in health care, where despite significant technological advancements, a user-friendly patient journey for those who fall sick does not yet exist. There is not one platform to carry a patient from sickness to wellness seamlessly: to include information, booking, tele-consultation, medical records and pharmaceutical delivery.
The pandemic has encouraged an incredibly large number of HealthTech start-ups to consider how we may re-invent this space.
The commoditisation of medical consultations over the phone or via web chat has rendered them a feature in most digital health solutions. These are now scaling to solve other industry challenges, ultimately bringing the entire medical office experience online, from diagnosis to booking a doctor’s appointment to administration, and automatically tracking health data (enabled by the commoditisation of wearables).
Ultimately, this will form the creation of a platform: one place to go for all your healthcare needs.
The biggest bottleneck for EdTech start-ups has always been the quality and availability of educational content. For many years, start-ups in this vertical struggled to find – and to create – engaging educational content. Then came Covid-19.
In a few short months, the world of education was inundated with content (good, bad, public, private, accurate, inaccurate) and education technology companies saw an unprecedented boom in users as schools and parents were forced to use remote learning options. Educators and parents alike grappled with making sense of all this new content, and these new start-ups: separating out the valuable from the useless, consolidating it and sharing it in a useful manner with children – all remotely and using technology.
The ineffectiveness of this process, combined with the commoditisation of content, highlights the massive need for an education platform: a user-friendly journey where content is consolidated, sorted and presented to the user in a manner that creates value, is trackable and where results can be seen.
WFH is the quintessential acronym to capture the impact of this pandemic on employment. Covid-19 has confined a greater number of people to their homes than perhaps any other event of the past hundred years. The shift has largely demonstrated that individuals can continue to create value for their organisations by working remotely, heralding an opportunity for the concept of work and offices to be revisited.
This confinement has given rise to more than just the adoption of video conferencing applications such as Zoom. It will force mindset changes around remote work, value creation and the complete abolishment of "face-time" at the office. This shift will democratise access to work opportunities and ensure individual contribution is measured by value created, not time spent.
For jobs where physical presence is required, technology and matching will be used to create platforms where the commoditisation of skills and time are factored into optimal matching with opportunities offering the highest level of pay, down to the week, day and even the hour.
I can imagine a platform that will one day match jobs directly to the online training and education required to do them and that then assigns future monetary value to different digital learning options.
A recent example of just such an approach is a company called Ogram. Its “human-cloud” platform offering on-demand temporary staffing solutions for on-site manpower, acting as a freelance marketplace connecting temporary workers to jobs in F&B, hospitality, retail, e-commerce and logistics sectors depending on time spent, and talent proven. This is, however, just the beginning.
As these three industries, in addition to others, experience a surge in technology adoption and reinvent themselves, history has taught us that the winners will be the platforms that create the most effective user-friendly journeys, allowing customers to access their desired products and services intuitively, and preferably in less than three clicks.
The rise of mobility platforms changed the world: it democratised access and opportunities for jobs across emerging economies where people could now easily go to work, creating income for their families.
There are now economic tailwinds to send health care, education and employment in a similar direction. This will provide inclusion in developed and developing regions alike: democratised access to these industries provide new opportunities and change the world.
Noor Sweid is founder and general partner of Global Ventures
Other acts on the Jazz Garden bill
Sharrie Williams
The American singer is hugely respected in blues circles due to her passionate vocals and songwriting. Born and raised in Michigan, Williams began recording and touring as a teenage gospel singer. Her career took off with the blues band The Wiseguys. Such was the acclaim of their live shows that they toured throughout Europe and in Africa. As a solo artist, Williams has also collaborated with the likes of the late Dizzy Gillespie, Van Morrison and Mavis Staples.
Lin Rountree
An accomplished smooth jazz artist who blends his chilled approach with R‘n’B. Trained at the Duke Ellington School of the Arts in Washington, DC, Rountree formed his own band in 2004. He has also recorded with the likes of Kem, Dwele and Conya Doss. He comes to Dubai on the back of his new single Pass The Groove, from his forthcoming 2018 album Stronger Still, which may follow his five previous solo albums in cracking the top 10 of the US jazz charts.
Anita Williams
Dubai-based singer Anita Williams will open the night with a set of covers and swing, jazz and blues standards that made her an in-demand singer across the emirate. The Irish singer has been performing in Dubai since 2008 at venues such as MusicHall and Voda Bar. Her Jazz Garden appearance is career highlight as she will use the event to perform the original song Big Blue Eyes, the single from her debut solo album, due for release soon.
Monster
Directed by: Anthony Mandler
Starring: Kelvin Harrison Jr., John David Washington
3/5
About Karol Nawrocki
• Supports military aid for Ukraine, unlike other eurosceptic leaders, but he will oppose its membership in western alliances.
• A nationalist, his campaign slogan was Poland First. "Let's help others, but let's take care of our own citizens first," he said on social media in April.
• Cultivates tough-guy image, posting videos of himself at shooting ranges and in boxing rings.
• Met Donald Trump at the White House and received his backing.
ULTRA PROCESSED FOODS
- Carbonated drinks, sweet or savoury packaged snacks, confectionery, mass-produced packaged breads and buns
- margarines and spreads; cookies, biscuits, pastries, cakes, and cake mixes, breakfast cereals, cereal and energy bars;
- energy drinks, milk drinks, fruit yoghurts and fruit drinks, cocoa drinks, meat and chicken extracts and instant sauces
- infant formulas and follow-on milks, health and slimming products such as powdered or fortified meal and dish substitutes,
- many ready-to-heat products including pre-prepared pies and pasta and pizza dishes, poultry and fish nuggets and sticks, sausages, burgers, hot dogs, and other reconstituted meat products, powdered and packaged instant soups, noodles and desserts.
Living in...
This article is part of a guide on where to live in the UAE. Our reporters will profile some of the country’s most desirable districts, provide an estimate of rental prices and introduce you to some of the residents who call each area home.
The specs
Engine: Dual 180kW and 300kW front and rear motors
Power: 480kW
Torque: 850Nm
Transmission: Single-speed automatic
Price: From Dh359,900 ($98,000)
On sale: Now
Mercer, the investment consulting arm of US services company Marsh & McLennan, expects its wealth division to at least double its assets under management (AUM) in the Middle East as wealth in the region continues to grow despite economic headwinds, a company official said.
Mercer Wealth, which globally has $160 billion in AUM, plans to boost its AUM in the region to $2-$3bn in the next 2-3 years from the present $1bn, said Yasir AbuShaban, a Dubai-based principal with Mercer Wealth.
“Within the next two to three years, we are looking at reaching $2 to $3 billion as a conservative estimate and we do see an opportunity to do so,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Mercer does not directly make investments, but allocates clients’ money they have discretion to, to professional asset managers. They also provide advice to clients.
“We have buying power. We can negotiate on their (client’s) behalf with asset managers to provide them lower fees than they otherwise would have to get on their own,” he added.
Mercer Wealth’s clients include sovereign wealth funds, family offices, and insurance companies among others.
From its office in Dubai, Mercer also looks after Africa, India and Turkey, where they also see opportunity for growth.
Wealth creation in Middle East and Africa (MEA) grew 8.5 per cent to $8.1 trillion last year from $7.5tn in 2015, higher than last year’s global average of 6 per cent and the second-highest growth in a region after Asia-Pacific which grew 9.9 per cent, according to consultancy Boston Consulting Group (BCG). In the region, where wealth grew just 1.9 per cent in 2015 compared with 2014, a pickup in oil prices has helped in wealth generation.
BCG is forecasting MEA wealth will rise to $12tn by 2021, growing at an annual average of 8 per cent.
Drivers of wealth generation in the region will be split evenly between new wealth creation and growth of performance of existing assets, according to BCG.
Another general trend in the region is clients’ looking for a comprehensive approach to investing, according to Mr AbuShaban.
“Institutional investors or some of the families are seeing a slowdown in the available capital they have to invest and in that sense they are looking at optimizing the way they manage their portfolios and making sure they are not investing haphazardly and different parts of their investment are working together,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Some clients also have a higher appetite for risk, given the low interest-rate environment that does not provide enough yield for some institutional investors. These clients are keen to invest in illiquid assets, such as private equity and infrastructure.
“What we have seen is a desire for higher returns in what has been a low-return environment specifically in various fixed income or bonds,” he said.
“In this environment, we have seen a de facto increase in the risk that clients are taking in things like illiquid investments, private equity investments, infrastructure and private debt, those kind of investments were higher illiquidity results in incrementally higher returns.”
The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, one of the largest sovereign wealth funds, said in its 2016 report that has gradually increased its exposure in direct private equity and private credit transactions, mainly in Asian markets and especially in China and India. The authority’s private equity department focused on structured equities owing to “their defensive characteristics.”
Other workplace saving schemes
- The UAE government announced a retirement savings plan for private and free zone sector employees in 2023.
- Dubai’s savings retirement scheme for foreign employees working in the emirate’s government and public sector came into effect in 2022.
- National Bonds unveiled a Golden Pension Scheme in 2022 to help private-sector foreign employees with their financial planning.
- In April 2021, Hayah Insurance unveiled a workplace savings plan to help UAE employees save for their retirement.
- Lunate, an Abu Dhabi-based investment manager, has launched a fund that will allow UAE private companies to offer employees investment returns on end-of-service benefits.
The Bio
Amal likes watching Japanese animation movies and Manga - her favourite is The Ancient Magus Bride
She is the eldest of 11 children, and has four brothers and six sisters.
Her dream is to meet with all of her friends online from around the world who supported her work throughout the years
Her favourite meal is pizza and stuffed vine leaves
She ams to improve her English and learn Japanese, which many animated programmes originate in
UAE currency: the story behind the money in your pockets
Honeymoonish
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