A CASUALTY STUDY IN BEING AHEAD BUT ALSO BEHIND

⋰ ORYX SIS 1 (Oryx Secondary for Information Systems) was the 1ˢᵗ tranche of a failed attempt to create a verticalized secondary banking house, built entirely to serve the scaling needs of the Information/Telecommunication Technologies (ICT) industry… with a niche of reducing time, risk, and cost in perilous emerging markets. ⋱

What put the nail in its coffin? 2009: The financial crisis and invention of Bitcoin’s blockchain, commencing the populous and open FinTech & DeFi movements, changing the banking system forever.Thanks to everyone who believed in its potential with their savings, sweat, advice, connections.The learning lives on through the people who contributed to it, at firms like Dubai Holding, Qatar Foundation, HP, Credit Suisse AG, ORACLE, Motorola, and AFAQ Group.

BETWEEN 2006-2010, the ORYX SIS venture sought alliances and friendly LBO candidates to interweave into a global network, offering:

An SPV was seeded with 100K AED minimum Paid-Up Capital by 3 execs from both technology vending and financing backgrounds. It succeeded at committing a 3.8M AED LoI from a Gulf angel investment syndicate for proof-of-concept. As it was axed before branding stage, the operating name of the bank never materialised and no capital was called (drawn).The stream upon which its model most relied was to be from debt to enterprise end users... via capital lending for software licensing & complex implementation projects, and equipment leasebacks for large data centers, hardware & networks. Benefits to industry were accelerated replacement of legacy systems through reduced financial barriers to customers from moving to the latest technology, enhanced vendor coverage in markets with less-developed SME financing options, and generally reinvigorating growth through ICT spending & margins.Despite having legally circumvented subjections to regulatory delay through its associate structure and mixed offshore / online location, it still gave way to changes in the industry (favoring devices plus the Cloud/XaaS model over the perpetual licensing / systems integration approach), laggard banker mindsets, difficulty differentiating perceptions from the international Silicon Valley Bank, and cashy Tier 1 vendors starting their own in-house tech finance divisions.

Now, onto the new.