As personal finance grows increasingly fragmented, with users juggling multiple apps, accounts, and financial obligations across borders, the demand for a more unified and intelligent approach has never been greater. Fintech platforms are evolving beyond single-use solutions to deliver holistic, real-time financial insights that align with how individuals actually manage their money today. Against this backdrop, Vault22 is positioning itself as a next-generation player, combining data aggregation, AI-driven decision-making, and cross-market visibility into a single, integrated experience. In this conversation, Stephen Ong, Co-founder of Vault22, shares how the company is redefining wealth management through intelligent automation, personalised financial guidance, and a strong focus on user-centric outcomes.
1. How is Vault22 differentiating itself in an increasingly crowded fintech landscape?
Most fintechs aim to solve a specific problem whether it is budgeting, investing or lending. When it comes to personal finance, customers don’t think in silos. Typical users have four or five different apps just to manage their financial life.
Vault22 brings everything into one intelligent layer, assets, liabilities, spending, investments and then actually acts on that data in real time. The differentiation isn’t aggregation alone, it’s about helping users with real-time decisions for specific outcomes whether they be short or long term.
2. What role does AI play in shaping personalised financial decision-making on your platform?
We leverage AI to understand a user’s specific financial situation, analyse their financial data and suggest a clear path to achieve their personal goals.
Tracking your money is not enough to build wealth consistently, users need to constantly optimise it. Most users have idle cash sitting in bank accounts, while paying interest on their debt. They are often lack the insurance cover they need or overspending to have too much cover.
These decisions often need to be made in real time to enable them to achieve their long-term goals. Without AI to keep our users on top of their complex financial positions, it’s incredibly challenging.
3. How are you addressing the needs of users managing finances across multiple markets and currencies?
This is exactly the problem we are solving for.
A large part of our user base lives internationally, they earn in one country, invest in another, and have obligations elsewhere. Traditional banks still treat these as separate worlds. We unify that into a single net worth view, across countries with different tax jurisdictions, and different economic drivers. We enable users to see their whole financial position. This clarity drives better decisions.
4. What opportunities do you see in the rise of Shariah-compliant digital investment solutions in the GCC?
It’s one of the most underserved and misunderstood segments globally. In the GCC, wealth is significant, with solutions and products playing catch up, especially when it comes to integrating everyday finance with Shariah principles.
What we’re building with Hafiq is different: it anchors financial life around obligations like Zakat, not just returns. Hafiq is built the ground up with Islamic first principles. It aligns users personal finance needs and goals with their lifestyle and faith.
5. How does Vault22 balance automation with human oversight in wealth management?
Automation handles speed and scale; humans handle judgment and choice.
We automate the heavy lifting, data aggregation, optimisation, recommendations, but we design the system so users stay in control or advisors can step in where it matters.
We believe AI and human interaction as complementary and produces optimal results to meet the users needs and goals.
6. What partnerships or ecosystem plays are critical to scaling Vault22 in the UAE and beyond?
There are many great solutions out there which we will partner with as it would be foolish to try to build everything. Our strategy is to be the intelligence layer that faces the customer and connects to banks, asset managers, insurers, and other fintech solutions.
We have integrations enabling us to connect with thousands of financial institutions for customer banking data and are have several distribution partnerships for financial products to ensure our customers get the best financial products suitable for the,
We believe customers should always have choice, and that they should diversify their financial wealth with different banks and asset managers for healthy risk management. We also realise some customers will always stay with their preferred bank.
Our Enterprise ‘Wealth as a Service’ solution offer banks the ability to serve their customers with the best experience enabling us to reach customer that are unlikely to move away from their ‘home’ bank.
Our approach to connect into existing ecosystems enables us to move faster and serve more customers.
