| Tamweel
CEO: Adel Al-Shirawi |
Adel Al-Shirawi is not overly modest about his company’s plans to expand abroad. "We should win the Nobel prize for this," he says. Perhaps he acquired a taste for international accolades after becoming one of the World Economic Forum’s Young World Leaders earlier this year. It is certainly a testament to his ambition that this US and British-educated 37-year-old, for the past three years the CEO of one of the two biggest UAE mortgage providers, can compare the influence of his firm’s ventures to those of Bangladeshi Nobel Peace Prize winner Mohammed Yunus.
But Tamweel, unlike Yunus’s Grameen Bank, does not advance microcredit. On the contrary, Al-Shirawi thinks Tamweel’s ability to make bigger loans available to more people will be the benefit his company will bring to such countries as Saudi Arabia, where he says many people find it hard to raise loans above the $50,000 to $70,000 range.
