Mumtalakat and ARP Group Win Initial Backing for AI-Native Bahrain Bank
The Bahraini sovereign fund and ARP Group plan a wholesale bank built on AI and blockchain, with regulated activity waiting on final approval.
Bahrain's sovereign wealth fund and ARP Group have received in-principle approval from the Central Bank of Bahrain to establish a wholesale bank in the kingdom, built around artificial intelligence and blockchain. Regulated activity would begin only after final authorisation is granted.
Mumtalakat, the state fund, is taking the venture forward with ARP Group, the holding company of ARP Global Capital and ARP Digital. The partners announced the plan on the sidelines of Gateway Gulf 2026. Yusuf Alireza, ARP Group's chairman and a co-founder of ARP Digital with Abdulla Kanoo and Abdulaziz Kanoo, said institutional clients with cross-border operations and complex requirements still encounter fragmented banking services.
The bank would serve regulated financial institutions, payment companies and companies operating across borders — clients whose needs stretch over several markets and currencies. Technology is intended to reduce the cost and the complexity of serving them.
Artificial intelligence is being built into the bank's operations. Programmable services would connect directly to clients' own systems through APIs, with human oversight, governance and risk controls wrapped around them. Products and services would launch in phases, guided by input from prospective clients.
Shaikh Abdulla bin Khalifa Al Khalifa, Mumtalakat's chief executive, said financial services have long been a cornerstone of Bahrain's economy. The fund, he said, invests in opportunities that strengthen the sector's competitiveness and support its evolution.
Wholesale banking is crowded ground in the Gulf, where several centres chase the same corporate and institutional business. Designing the institution around AI and distributed ledger infrastructure from the start, rather than retrofitting it onto an existing balance sheet, puts the technology and the risk controls in the same frame early. The phased rollout and the outstanding final approval leave the eventual scale of the operation open.
