Raaz: The Muscat Fintech Turning Bank Statements Into Insight

A small team in Muscat has built a free app that turns a confusing pile of bank statements into a single, readable picture of a household's money. The startup is called Raaz, and it is a useful case study in how Oman's fintech scene is quietly filling gaps left by global apps that were never built with Omani banks or Arabic-first families in mind.

🔑 Key Takeaways

• Raaz is a Muscat-built personal finance app that lets users upload bank statements (PDF or CSV) for automatic transaction categorization and a proprietary "Financial Health Score."
• It was founded by Daanish Khan under the entity AiN Technologies, later joined by partner Aflah al Lawati and marketing associate Al Waleed al Musafir.
• The app is completely free with no premium tier, and it has received early-stage backing from ITHCA and support through the Omantel Innovation Labs accelerator programme.
• Since its public launch in April 2026, Raaz has passed 250 downloads with minimal marketing and struck a promotional partnership with Sohar International, its first bank partner.
• Data is hosted in Omani data centers under PCI DSS and ISO 27001/9001/27017/27018 certifications, and the company says it complies with Oman's Personal Data Protection Law.

💡 What Raaz Actually Does

Most people in Oman, like most people anywhere, keep money spread across a current account, a savings account and maybe a credit card, with no single view of where it all goes. Raaz tries to solve that by asking users to upload their bank statements, then using automated categorization to sort transactions into groceries, utilities, entertainment, transfers and so on. According to Muscat Daily, the app builds this into a "Financial Health Score" that weighs spending ratio, emergency fund sustainability and income stability rather than simply visualizing past transactions.

The app's own FAQ page is unusually specific about the mechanics: statements can be uploaded in PDF or CSV format from Oman-based banks, internal transfers between a user's own accounts are automatically detected and excluded, and the underlying bank statement file is deleted once the data has been extracted and approved. The Financial Health Score itself needs a minimum of six months of data to be considered reliable, and Raaz is careful to note it is not a credit score and has no bearing on a user's actual creditworthiness.

The homepage frames the product around five actions: tracking transactions across accounts, breaking down spending by category, understanding income versus savings over custom time periods, planning a budget against historical patterns, and monitoring the Health Score over time, all wrapped in what the company describes as "bank-grade security" with 256-bit encryption and read-only account access.

👤 Who Is Building It

Raaz traces back to founder Daanish Khan, who according to a Zawya report got the idea while reviewing his own family's finances alongside his wife as they planned for their son's education. He was later joined by Aflah al Lawati as partner and Al Waleed al Musafir as marketing associate, both described as friends who recognized the same frustration with fragmented personal finance tools.

The company originally traded under the name AiN Technologies before rebranding to Raaz, a name Khan told Zawya carries a double meaning in Arabic: "to weigh" or "measure value," and also "secrets," reflecting the idea of surfacing hidden patterns inside a family's financial data.

🎯 Target Customers and the Problem Being Solved

Raaz is aimed squarely at young Omani families and individuals who have some savings or income but lack a clear, ongoing picture of where their money actually goes each month. As Khan put it to Muscat Daily, the pain point was personal: "We realised that although we had saved some money, we didn't really know what to do with it." That is a common problem across the GCC, where global tools like Mint (now discontinued) or YNAB were never built with local bank formats, Arabic-language support or GCC spending patterns in mind. Raaz's own site notes full Arabic and English support with right-to-left layouts as a differentiator for the Omani and wider GCC market it hopes to serve.

💵 Pricing

Unlike many SaaS products that hold back features behind a paywall, Raaz has no premium tier at all. The FAQ page states plainly: "Yes, Raaz is free for all users. Raaz does not have a premium subscription version." The company's revenue model instead appears to lean on partnerships, offering discounts and promotions from brands and financial institutions to app users rather than charging subscription fees directly.

🛠️ Tech Approach and Data Handling

Because the product depends on people uploading actual bank statements, data handling is central to Raaz's pitch. The company says data is hosted in Omani data centers and certified under PCI DSS, ISO 27001, ISO 9001, ISO 27017 and ISO 27018, alongside compliance with Oman's Personal Data Protection Law. Readers who want more background on how that law has evolved recently can see our coverage of Royal Decree 68/2026 amending Oman's data protection law, which sets the regulatory backdrop that fintech apps like Raaz now operate under.

On the product side, Raaz uses data analytics and, per the Zawya report, machine learning to refine categorization and recommendations as more data comes in. It also generates an anonymized "Raaz ID" so that individual transactions cannot be traced back to a specific person when aggregated data is used to power partner offers.

⚖️ How Raaz Compares to Alternatives

Oman's app stores are not short of budgeting tools. Sensor Tower data on the Q1 2025 personal finance category in Oman shows apps like Money Manager, Splitwise and BudgetBakers' Wallet already active in the market, alongside bank-native tools from lenders such as Bank Nizwa and Alizz Islamic Bank. Raaz's pitch against that field rests on three things: it is built specifically for Omani bank statement formats and Arabic-first users, it is free with no premium wall unlike most global competitors, and its Financial Health Score attempts to give a single, digestible number rather than just charts and categories. The tradeoff is that Raaz is new, small, and depends on manual statement uploads rather than the direct bank API connections ("open banking") that some larger regional fintechs are pursuing, meaning users still have to do the work of exporting and uploading statements themselves rather than syncing automatically.

📈 Journey So Far

• ~Early 2025: Company founded as AiN Technologies by Daanish Khan.
• January 2026: Initial prototype released to a limited group of users, as reported by Muscat Daily.
• April 19, 2026: Official public launch of the Raaz app.
• Weeks after launch: Surpassed 250 downloads with minimal marketing spend, according to Muscat Daily's follow-up report.
• Ongoing: Sohar International became the first bank to promote its products through the Raaz platform, a partnership that fits into the broader push by Omani banks to work with fintech startups; see our coverage of Sohar International's new fintech hub for more on that trend.
• Funding: Early-stage backing from ITHCA, plus participation in the Omantel Innovation Labs accelerator programme, though the exact investment amount has not been publicly disclosed.

🔗 Links

• Official website: raaz-app.com
• LinkedIn: Raaz App on LinkedIn
• App Store: Raaz on the App Store
• Google Play: Raaz on Google Play

Public sources do not disclose a specific team headcount for Raaz, and no additional named hires beyond the founding trio (Khan, al Lawati and al Musafir) have surfaced in press coverage so far, a reminder that this is still very much an early-stage operation rather than a scaled company.

🇴🇲 Why This Matters for Oman

Financial literacy and household savings behavior are recurring themes in Oman's Vision 2040 push toward a more diversified, digitally capable economy, and small fintech tools like Raaz play a modest but real part in that picture by making it easier for ordinary families to understand and plan around their own money. The fact that a homegrown team, backed by local investor ITHCA and mentored through Omantel's own accelerator, chose to build specifically for Omani banks, Arabic-speaking users and the Sultanate's data protection rules shows the kind of locally grounded product development that Vision 2040's digital economy goals are meant to encourage. It also fits a wider pattern this year of Omani fintechs finding early traction through bank partnerships rather than big-bang funding rounds, echoing the story of Mamun's Saleh Al Tamami covered in our piece on his journey from paralegal to fintech CEO. Whether Raaz can scale beyond its first few hundred downloads into a genuinely widely used tool remains to be seen, but it is a useful reminder that not every Omani tech story needs a headline-grabbing funding round to be worth watching.