'We don't want to take an American approach': BOLT's Justin Grooms on building for the UAE

Arabian Business

23-05-2025

Justin Grooms, President of BOLT, didn't land in Dubai with a pitch deck and playbook. He came to listen. After six years leading the company – North America's leading identity layer and payments aggregator – he's learned that the future of checkout won't be built in a lab. It has to be shaped by how people live, pay, and trust in each market. And right now, he believes some of the most interesting progress is happening in Dubai.
'I've been at BOLT for a little over six years now,' he says. 'The company has, to a certain extent, grown a lot, but to another extent, has been exactly on the same mission the whole time. We are currently North America's leading identity layer and payments aggregator for merchants and consumers, and we're looking at expanding into new markets, and that's one of the main reasons that I'm here in Dubai.'
BOLT built its name by solving something deceptively simple: giving users control over how they identify and how they pay – all within a single, consistent checkout experience. It's a principle that sounds obvious, but Grooms says it's been missing from digital commerce for years.
'What we found has really been key to our success is to acknowledge that consumers want to have agency over not only their identity but the payment options that they have inside of their wallets,' he explains. 'This is not a radical concept.'
From plastic wallets to digital control
Grooms brings it back to a habit most of us had for years: carrying a physical wallet.
'If we think of the physical wallets that you and I carry, or at least used to carry around, we would have the physical cards, our identity, everything there and under our control, and it would be up to us when we would take a card out and hand it to a merchant, or hand cash to someone else to pay them.'
What changed in the shift to online retail, he says, was ownership. Suddenly, your identity and your payment method were handled by the platform – not by you.
'Where BOLT has been very successful is allowing consumers to sort of own that identity. When we think about owning identity, one of the benefits that it does is that it allows us to incorporate all of the different payment types that a consumer might have under one roof, and then start to deliver some insights to that consumer about what type of payment might be most appropriate for the transaction that they're considering at that moment.'
That choice – not just over what to buy, but how and with what – is where Grooms believes the real shift in fintech is happening.
'We think that that's going to be the differentiator between what we're doing today in fintech and e-commerce, and what happens in the future.'
Why AI matters more than ever
But there's another piece to this puzzle: how fast and accurately platforms can evaluate risk. For years, companies gathered data but didn't have the tools to act on it in real time. That's changing now.
'The data has always essentially been there, the ability to collect the information,' he says. 'What has not been there, and what's only recently really being commercialised, is the ability to process and action on that information very quickly in a transaction.'
This isn't a theoretical improvement. It's a fundamental upgrade to how digital commerce functions.
'What that means in a practical basis is that I can look at thousands or tens of thousands of data points in a transaction and, in real time, evaluate if it looks and feels right, and if I feel good about the transaction, and if we should allow it to essentially go through.'
Accuracy isn't just about reducing fraud. It's about removing friction for legitimate users – and protecting the pace of the customer journey.
'If we look at the massive amount of data that we collect through a checkout flow or a purchasing flow, we can get extremely accurate in essentially determining how much risk is associated with an individual transaction.'
Thinking like a customer
Grooms says that inside BOLT, product decisions don't begin with surveys or stakeholder reports. They begin with one question: what would we want as consumers?
'We like to even think internally when we're developing a product, there's this desire sometimes to go out and do market research or talk to merchant partners or whatever,' he says. 'What we found when we built the best product is when we imagine ourselves as consumers and what we would want.'
That's especially relevant in the UAE – a region with its own preferences, expectations, and transaction habits.
'One of the reasons that I'm here is to really understand Dubai specifically, the UAE more broadly, and then the whole region. What are the cultural expectations around transactions? How do people view their identity and how identity is managed? What are they used to in market with other successful providers? And how can we incorporate that into the technology infrastructure that we have?'
He's direct about what not to do.
'We don't want to take an American approach to identity and e-commerce and export it to this part of the world, just like it would probably not work vice versa.'
Local fit, global lessons
That sensitivity to context extends to how BOLT handles regulation. Even in the U.S., the company doesn't roll out one uniform system – it adjusts for each state.
'Even there, we have state-by-state application of different privacy laws, different regulations around banking that we've sort of grown up integrating with,' he explains.
The same approach is guiding their expansion abroad. Grooms says the goal isn't to make Dubai adjust to their product – it's to shape the product around Dubai's regulatory and consumer frameworks.
'I don't want to export an American way of handling transactions,' he says. 'I want to build an inherently local way that connects with folks here in Dubai, in the region in general.'
That mindset also explains why he's paying attention to what's happening here with crypto and digital currencies – not as experiments, but as real consumer tools.
'The adoption of new currencies, of experimentation with cryptocurrencies and using cryptocurrencies in really everyday transactions – not sort of gimmicky, I'm going to try it out – it's really happening here in a way that very few other, you know, really developing or developed parts of the world see.'
'This place reminds me of Silicon Valley'
Asked how he sees the UAE's fintech scene evolving over the next few years, Grooms doesn't hesitate.
'The big thing that we see about UAE is a real openness from the government and from regulators to be best in class,' he says. 'To want to build regulations that will, of course, protect consumers in a very robust and legitimate way, will protect the infrastructure of the national economy here, but are also forward-looking… building regulations for 2030 or 2040, as opposed to trying to make regulations that came from 1930 or 1940 apply to what we're doing today.'
But it's more than just policy. It's a mindset – one that feels familiar.
'There is a culture of innovation in the UAE generally, and in Dubai specifically, that frankly reminds me a lot of Silicon Valley – very entrepreneurial, very forward-thinking, very risk-taking, a culture of wanting to make the big bets to sort of change the world.'
Final thought
Grooms isn't here to copy-paste a model. He's here to understand how people buy, what they expect, and how trust is built.
'This is a community, this is a culture that is very much about innovating for the future,' he says. 'And I think that's some of the best things that have, frankly, come out of Silicon Valley in the past, too.'