How can institutional investors successfully navigate relationships, business launches, and evolving investment priorities in Saudi Arabia and the broader GCC?
Speaking at the recent LEAP conference, Hattan Jabban, CEO of Vidrio Arabia, shared how Vidrio supports allocators—including sovereign wealth funds, family offices, endowments, and pensions—by providing advanced technology for investment operations that simplifies the management of complex alternative investments.
By: Hattan Jabban, Vidrio Financial
Vidrio Arabia and its parent company Vidrio Financial have been observing the increasing importance and growth of technology across the investment management space. This importance has brought recognition to Vidrio’s front door from several publications and their award programs across categories like Best Data and Technology Institutional Investors, Portfolio Monitoring & Reporting Solution of the Year, Best AI Solution or Tool for Investment Intelligence, Best Analytics Tool, Most Innovative Technology Firm, and more.
Capitalizing on this momentum, the Vidrio Arabia team recently spoke at the 5th Annual LEAP conference in Saudi Arabia to explore how technology is transforming the Kingdom and what this evolution means for institutional investors.
Below, Vidrio Arabia, CEO, Hattan Jabban shares his key insights. 
Vidrio Arabia: Kingdom Outlook
Vidrio Arabia’s mandate is quite simple - reduce the complexity for institutional investors and replace it with greater operational transparency and investment clarity and control. Across the GCC, we partner with sovereign wealth funds, pensions, family offices, and asset managers who are seeking deeper investment intelligence in alternatives. One of the biggest operational challenges that we see in our work today is that these organizations have a tsunami of data headed at them almost daily, which is hard to organize and efficiently build strategic investment decisions around. Through our innovative tools and services, we can collect, normalize, and validate the data, providing clients with a single view of their portfolios to better understand investment performance, risk, liquidity, and exposure. Early on, we recognized that serving the Saudi Arabian market required a tailored approach. We achieved success by acting as true partners—listening closely to pain points, understanding unique needs, and demonstrating that inaction can be just as costly as choosing the wrong technology partner.
Where is the Kingdom headed?
The conversation around technology in Saudi Arabia is evolving. A few years ago, discussions centered on the broad ambitions and growth targets of Vision 2030.
Today, those conversations are all about the execution of innovative technology – how global technology companies are establishing themselves in the Kingdom, how local companies are scaling, what AI investments should be targeted, and how Saudi Arabian institutions are becoming sophisticated buyers of technology. This direction points away from the Kingdom becoming a simple consumer of that technology and more of a producer, investor, and ultimately an exporter of new technology and innovation.
Along with this transformation, you have other forces that few markets can replicate. Supported by unmatched capital reserves, strong government backing, high technology adoption rates, and a young, digitally native population, the trajectory is clear. For Vidrio Arabia and the attendees at LEAP, the question is no longer whether Saudi Arabia will become a major tech hub, but how far its reach will extend for global allocators and the wider business world.
What is the regional context as it relates to foreign investors and businesses?
Vidrio Arabia believes that the Kingdom has a very distinctive position in the region. While Dubai continues to thrive as an international business hub and Abu Dhabi builds a powerful ecosystem, Saudi Arabia offers unmatched size, scale, and speed.
Saudi Arabia has a population of roughly 35 million with significant institutional capital, major government investment, and one of the world’s most ambitious economic transformation programs. Through our discussions, we see Saudi Arabia not as a simple regional office location but as a significant market for foreign investors and businesses. The important factor here is that you can’t manage Saudi Arabian business activities remotely. Customers value local presence with an observable commitment to the market, an understanding of their business and service requirements, and an engagement lasting at least five to ten years.
What advice should technology companies pay attention to when looking to be successful in the Kingdom following a first-time discussion at LEAP?
While Vidrio Arabia continually refines its own metrics for success, any firm looking to enter the Saudi Arabian market should keep three core principles in mind:
1. Given the level of sophistication, competitiveness, and the need for deeper relationships, the market in Saudi Arabia cannot be a copy-and-paste of another regional market strategy. Our team advises that new entrants put in the work to understand the client and the problems they’re looking to solve through your technology.
2. Transactions are secondary. Relationships and trust matter more than you know, and it is our team’s experience that without these, your business will struggle.
3. Show commitment. This can equate to opening an office, building a team presence, developing partnerships, hiring Saudi talent, and contributing to the ecosystem. The principle of constructing or expanding on an ecosystem can lead to other benefits in your business. We launched our own ecosystem called VIP to provide institutional investors, fund managers, and specialized service providers with a platform to collaborate and access unique investment opportunities across managed funds, secondary auctions, co-investments, and more.
Above all, remember that attending LEAP is easy, and the insights that you take away from the event are valuable. However, your success in the Kingdom will be dependent on how you conduct yourself and your business outside of the event forums that you attend.
The Best Business Advice for Entering the Saudi Market
When Vidrio Arabia launched in Saudi Arabia, the best advice that we received was simply not to rush any relationship. Regardless of where your business roots began, and those are important, you need to make sure conditioned responses to business meetings are moved away from transactional outcomes.
Transactional steps include things like meeting, proposal submissions, follow-ups on those proposals, and working towards a contract close. Have coffee, take the time to answer follow-up questions through deeper-dive meetings, work to become a sounding board for any client brainstorming sessions you might be invited to, and understand the person or team on the other side of the fence and what goals they're trying to achieve.
The team at Vidrio Arabia sees a tremendous opportunity across the kingdom, but there is also tremendous competition. Companies that demonstrate their long-term engagement strategy through local investment, talent, and genuine participation in the ecosystem will see greater success. You just need to be patient enough to let it compound.
More about Vidrio Arabia:
Vidrio Arabia (https://www.vidrio.com/investment-solutions-middle-east) is a leading provider of alternative investment management technology and managed data services for institutional investors. We empower allocators with a unified platform that delivers portfolio management, analytics, and data intelligence across complex investment portfolios. Leveraging automation, machine learning, and agentic AI, Vidrio helps investment teams improve efficiency, strengthen oversight, and make more informed decisions.
More about the VIP Ecosystem:
Our VIP platform further serves this ecosystem by providing access to investment opportunities across managed funds, secondary auctions, co-investments, high-quality LP advisory services, and more, all without requiring the building of additional infrastructure.
