Saudi Arabia’s Prince Mohammad bin Fahd University (PMU) is set to integrate a prominent Pakistani online education application, KTrade, into its classrooms to educate Saudi students about stock investment and savings, a top KTrade official said on Monday.
KTrade, a new age stock and commodity brokerage, was launched in Pakistan in 2021. The app, which operates in Pakistan and the United Kingdom (UK), is one of the most downloaded stock investment tools with over 1 million downloads worldwide.
KTrade Pakistan Chairman Ali Fareed Khwaja said his company had signed an agreement with the PMU in November and the private, non-profit university in the Saudi city of Al-Khobar would be using the KTrade app in their classrooms.
“KTrade is an educational platform through which Saudi youth can learn about investment and savings,” Khwaja said. “For this, we are partnering with universities. We have already signed an MoU (Memorandum of Understanding) with Prince Muhammad University, which is going to use Ktrade in their classrooms for teaching about stock investment and about savings.”
In September this year, KTrade also signed an MoU with ANB Capital, a subsidiary of the Arab National Bank (ANB), to educate the Saudi youth on financial concepts.
The Saudi operations of KTrade are being operated from Pakistan in terms of technology, marketing and research, according to its chairman.
“We are excited about rolling [out] KTrade to teach Saudi youth about saving and investment in terms of its impact on Pakistan,” Khwaja said. “[A] lot of our team is based in Pakistan, so it’s Pakistani talent which is being used for these services.”
The platform is already sharing with global investors its equity research on Saudi Arabia and potential investment avenues in Pakistan.
Explaining about its entry into the Saudi market, Khwaja said the Kingdom was right now the “most exciting market” in the world, with its stock market trading at more than $1.5 billion a day.
“They have Vision 2030 for promoting savings, for teaching their youth how to save and how to invest,” he told Arab News.
“So, it was the ideal market for taking KTrade… we were sure that our product is good and strong, we were sure that there was a massive demand driven by Saudi Vision 2030 and the growth in the capital markets in Saudi Arabia.”
The Vision 2030 reform plan is a package of economic and social policies designed to free the Kingdom of its reliance on oil exports. It is aimed at developing public service sectors in the Kingdom such as health, education, infrastructure, recreation and tourism.
To a question about the platform’s contribution in creating jobs for Pakistanis, the KTrade chairman said some of their clients, including individual investors, asset managers, insurance companies and banks, ended up hiring Pakistani people, when they were introduced with KTrade services.
“Because we have gone and told them that there is so much talent over here (Pakistan) and they’ve seen us and through us, they’ve gotten recommendations,” he said. “So, Pakistani people have gotten jobs there (Saudi Arabia).”
Khwaja said KTrade’s entry into the Saudi market was also helping Saudi investors explore investment avenues in Pakistan as the South Asian nation desperately looks for foreign investment.
“We all in Pakistan know that Pakistan is looking forward for Saudi investments in some of the mega projects in Pakistan through privatization and in some of these conversations, we are involved in telling the Saudi investors more about both Pakistan as well as investment assets in Pakistan,” he added.
