Dubai-based B2B Fintech Startup Lune makes financial transaction data useful for MENA entities

This article is part of an ongoing series covering startups that have been part of the Mohammed Bin Rashid Innovation Fund (MBRIF) accelerator program.

For Alexandre Soued and Helal Lootah, they founded their Dubai-based fintech startup Lune as a result of observing a massive lack of financial literacy among UAE residents. But when the high school best friends-turned-co-founders first decided to tackle the problem, it didn’t immediately lead to the creation of the B2B startup they’re at the helm of today. “Our first version of Lune was a B2C mobile application designed to help social saving – ie it helped people manage and understand their spending,” recalls Soued. “However, it didn’t go as planned, but we were able to jump in at the deep end, and really grow as entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs through that experience.”

And as is the hallmark of any resilient entrepreneur, the co-founders decided to apply the lessons learned from their first venture and redesign Lune to work as a B2B platform instead. “We saw the difference our first solution made to everyday users, and by working hand-in-hand with our users, the change we could make,” explains Soued. “We launched, after months of hard work, and we could finally see users jumping into the app, using it on a daily basis and helping us find ways to make it even better. After a few weeks, we started getting interest from institutions who saw what we were doing and wanted to be a part of it.”

Here, what remains clear in Soued’s response is that at its core, Lune’s B2B approach is still trying to address the lack of financial literacy that Soued and Lootah had first noticed. “At first we were skeptical and thought we would be better off alone, but then we realized we could do more for financial literacy by working together,” he explains. “It meant we could help more consumers across MENA understand their finances, clearly and concisely, without even having to download another app.”

Helal Lootah, co-founder, Lune

Today, Lune collaborates with companies, financial institutions and fintechs in its mission to democratize financial data. “We use a software-as-a-service (SaaS) business model and work with banks, fintech companies and retailers to enable them to provide customers with the insights and products they need,” says Soued. “Lune is therefore focused on unlocking the power of transaction data, and empowering consumers to build a brighter financial future. Essentially, we take raw transaction data, such as credit card spending, and we enrich and analyze it to provide a clear overview of how , where and when this spend occurs. We provide this to both our partners and their end consumers.”

Among Lune’s many offerings are money management tools that enable a given company’s customers to manage their expenses, cash flows and budgets. It also helps customers identify financial trends, keep an eye on future savings and understand their own spending habits. This in turn gives businesses an easy way to analyze customer spend data and also offers financial accounting tools for data including customer balances, debt, recurring expenses and cash flows.

And according to Soued, it is the simplicity of the offers that is one of Lune’s greatest strengths. “Lune is designed to give end users a clear view of key figures from day one,” he says. “So our customers don’t need to take resources from their analytics or technology teams to use Lune – we act as an analytics tool that anyone can use to gain insights, saving our customers both time and money.”

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Here Soued says something that is perhaps really worth quoting when talking about financial literacy and data. “Brand transactions are as much an art as they are a science,” he says. “If it’s not properly maintained, the rest of the solution becomes useless.” This encapsulates the importance of Lune’s other offering, transaction enrichment (the process of turning ambiguous transaction information into clear and categorized data), which Lune achieves using the Enrichment Application Programming Interface (API).

“We handle all data cleansing and enrichment through our SaaS model, where we continuously maintain and update the database on behalf of our clients,” says Soued. Being built as a plug-and-play solution has also proven to be another of Lune’s unique selling points, with Soued saying: “Our integration is built by developers, for developers, and thus our customers can go to market in Additionally, since we’re building for the next generation of finance, Lune is also data agnostic. This means our customers can leverage direct banking APIs, open banking, or both to unlock the power of transaction data.”

Lune is currently in a proof-of-concept stage with partners in the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Oman, offering the startup a combined user base of over one million customers. Lune’s funding so far has come through investments made by the co-founders’ friends and families, as well as angel investors. “Our goal from the beginning has been to build a business that solves a genuine pain point through technology and innovation, and I’m happy to say that our investors are all aligned with that vision,” says Soued.

Meanwhile, as a participant in the MBRIF program, Soued and his team have been able to get closer to the vision they have for Lune. “The MBRIF program has been fantastic so far – it’s been great to meet and be part of a program with such a strong sense of community,” says Soued. “The founders that we’ve interacted with are all really passionate about what they do, and I think some of them have the power to change the world, and being in that kind of environment is really inspiring.”

And if Soued’s plans for the future are anything to go by, he seems to be moving forward with a lot of optimism. “Over the next few years, I think we will see Lune go from being a local player to a global player,” he says. “We are seeing a massive shift where financial institutions are realizing the importance of simplifying transaction data, both to create better experiences and empower consumers, and we aim to be the infrastructure that enables this shift.”

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