Speaking with FINTECH.TV at the Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange this week, Omar AlYawer of Ruya Partners addressed a question the firm hears often: why does the GCC need private credit?
As he explained, banks across the region tend to lend against hard assets such as land and real estate. Yet many of the businesses driving the region’s growth are asset-light and cash-flow rich, and the traditional lending system was never built to say yes to them.
That, AlYawer noted, is the gap Ruya Partners was created to fill. The firm invests against cash flow, designing bespoke structures around what a business can support today while leaving room for it to grow.
He was also clear that, for Ruya Partners, “local” does not mean a single country: it means the entire GCC. He pointed to GymNation, a UAE business whose next chapter of growth came from expanding into Saudi Arabia, as an example of what the region looks like when capital and opportunity move across borders, and precisely what private credit was built for.