Integrating our Engineering and Advanced Data capabilities across our product offerings, infrastructure, personnel and financial resources is, therefore, a natural component of our strategy for achieving organizational excellence. The Group’s Technology Division is structured in a way that empowers all verticals to achieve their individual targets and ensure the synergy between them, allowing the Group overall to meet its overarching strategic objectives as the business continues to expand and grow.

The Technology Division has strategically focused on the following areas:

Unleashing the Power of Data in Jahez Group

Jahez Group has set data driven objectives aiming to transform data into a strategic asset that drives the group’s growth and enhances its market competitiveness. These objectives are as follows:

• Data democratization, ensuring data accessibility throughout the organization to enable more informed decision-making processes.
• The enhancement of data literacy among employees, equipping them with the skills necessary to understand, analyze, and effectively utilize data.
• The utilization of advanced AI-driven analytics to inform and shape strategic decisions.
• The establishment of comprehensive data governance frameworks to uphold data integrity and ensure regulatory compliance.
• The exploration and implementation of data monetization strategies, opening up new channels for revenue generation.
• The commitment to social responsibility by leveraging data-driven initiatives that have a meaningful impact on society.

Highlights of 2023

In 2023, in line with our strategic objective of operational excellence and other objectives such as increased customer loyalty, our technology division developed several new features, tools and products with a focus on merchant partners.

Advancing the Infrastructure of Data & AI

The Group has invested in Data & AI’s infrastructure by bringing in an advanced data science platform that not only simplifies and accelerates the data science lifecycle, but also aligns with strategic objectives by enabling smarter decision-making, fostering artificial intelligence innovation, and facilitating a culture of collaboration.

Additionally, the Group invested into a transformative analytics engine platform that directly contributes to the Group’s growth, agility, and competitive edge from data perspective. It enables real-time analytics and insights, as well as providing state-of-the-art comprehensive data governance and security features, ensuring data across the enterprise is accurate, consistent, and used responsibly. It also supports setting policies, standards, and procedures for data management to comply with regulations and support the Group’s business objectives.

Future-proofing Our Technology

During the reporting period, our technology division invested heavily in supporting the Group’s growth agenda and also in anticipation of any future verticals we may potentially explore. We concentrated on developing the infrastructure needed to support further expansion, which signified our approach to technology as a driving force of growth.

Cloud-Agnostic Infrastructure

Jahez Group initiated its strategic initiative to adopt a cloud-agnostic approach in its infrastructure. This decision aligns with our commitment to business continuity, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness, ensuring we remain at the forefront of our industry.

Why Cloud-Agnostic?

Allowing the Group to design and operate applications and services that are not dependent on a single cloud provider. This approach enables us to seamlessly switch between cloud platforms and utilize multiple platforms simultaneously, without being locked into one vendor.

Our team is diligently working on implementing this cloud-agnostic approach, ensuring a smooth transition and minimal disruption to our operations. We are confident that this strategic move will not only enhance our operational efficiency but also provide a solid foundation for sustainable growth in the ever-evolving digital landscape.

Expanding Capabilities through Acquisitions

At the very onset of the reporting period, the Group completed the full, self-funded acquisition of Marn Business Information Technology Company, in what promises to be a successful expansion of our technology portfolio.

Marn provides digital solutions to the Group’s merchant partners and has a number of business-facing applications at its disposal, facilitating a more robust integration process. While adding value to the merchant and its product portfolio, Marn’s services to merchant partners invariably enhances the service quality of Jahez overall without severely impacting the merchant’s day-to-day operations. With respect to our venture capital investments, the involvement of Marn has resulted in impressive levels of alignment with respect to product management, user interface, UX, engineering, architecture, cloud infrastructure and data, among other factors. This serves to create and extract value through these synergies between our various subsidiaries and investments.

Following the acquisition, the Group’s Technology Division engaged with the subsidiary gradually, ensuring Marn meets benchmark quality standards set by Jahez across the subsidiary’s development process as well as in day-to-day operations. Once fully compliant and aligned with Jahez standards in user experience (UX), design and other technical aspects, Internet retail and payment solutions developed by Marn will be steadily integrated across Jahez products and subsidiaries, further expanding and strengthening our merchant product portfolio.

An unwavering commitment to privacy

Overcoming Challenges

During 2023, acquiring the talent needed to onboard these technologies proved a challenge, which we’re now overcoming by partnering with a number of academic institutions who train personnel under a sponsorship scheme by Jahez.

The Group also has a working relationship with a number of ICT talent communities in the Kingdom and beyond whose capabilities we continue to benefit from. We are regularly approached by high-caliber talents in Engineering, Data and Artificial Intelligence, product and design, and other fields eager to join Jahez given its reputation as a trendsetter in technological innovation. This works to the advantage of both parties, with Jahez getting to leverage the latest in tech knowhow and the new recruits availing the opportunity to hone their skills and test them with real products.

Among our activities to attract and retain talent to the Technology Division during the year under review were the launch of Jahez Digital; an initiative that focuses on sponsorships, partnerships, bootcamps and the like for digital-based communities and events, which helped enhance Jahez’s image as a technology leader and as a pillar of the ICT community.

More recently, a blog has been launched as part of Jahez Digital initiative where we publish content written by our own team members, showcasing the knowhow of our immense wealth of talent, helping us achieve higher levels of top-of-mind awareness among ICT professionals in the Kingdom and thereby increase our brand equity and help scale up through increased hires.

Research and Development

Beyond digitalization and automation, Jahez is currently experimenting with robotic as well as drone technology. Having partnered with King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), we have created a conducive environment for R&D teams to practice and develop proof of concepts (POC) for utilising drones and robotics in controlled environments. We continue to support regulation and policy making under this technology vertical, so that we can apply, integrate, and pioneer proven technologies in real-world scenarios. To this end, we are working very closely with the Ministry of Transport and Logistic Services as well as the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, to launch these technologies at smaller scale as early as 2024.