Banking is often seen as a space driven by modern systems and advanced technology. Ruya Community Islamic Bank L.L.C. is changing that perspective by demonstrating that innovation and timeless Islamic principles can work together to deliver exceptional customer-centric experiences. As the Head of Strategy & Products at ruya, Marie d’Halluin is serving as a bridge between the ethical foundation and the technology frontier. She aims to keep connecting these worlds: strategy and design, innovation and integrity, people and purpose.
Marie’s task is to ensure that innovation does not outpace authenticity, digital speed never undermines fairness, and every product honours both the spirit of Islamic finance and the expectations of 21st-century customers. “I want to help shape an Islamic banking landscape where customers don’t have to choose between values and convenience, but where the two are inseparable,” she says.
Leading Strategically and Humanly
Marie points out that her approach to leadership has always been guided by purpose and the belief that finance should serve people, not the other way around.
When she was new in her career, Marie worked in both traditional and digital banking models. She saw firsthand how complexity often distances people from what truly matters: trust, clarity, and impact for customers. This eventually shaped her conviction that strategy should simplify and not complicate things for people they serve. She also realized that leadership should always connect vision to values, and values to execution. “At ruya, these beliefs align perfectly with Islamic banking’s ethical foundation,” Marie says.
According to her, the principles of fairness, transparency, and shared prosperity are not mere regulatory requirements. They are leadership values as well as a reminder that every product decision is also a social one.
And, on a personal level, being both a strategist and a mother have taught her that leadership is as much about empathy as it is about execution. “It is about seeing potential in people, giving them space to grow, and guiding them with integrity,” Marie says.
So, the values that influence her leadership, ownership, trust, and service, are not abstract ideals. Marie says that they are her lived experiences. “They help me lead both strategically and humanly,” she says. “That ensures that our growth as a bank never outpaces our responsibility to the community we serve.”
Achievement: Shaping ruya’s Digital-first & Community Model
Marie’s career has been dotted with achievements across global and UAE leading banks. She, however, is most proud of helping shape ruya’s digital-first and community banking model. According to her, this model demonstrated that an Islamic bank can be both “deeply ethical” and “refreshingly modern.” It has transformed the way they communicate with their customers, making them feel seen, supported, and understood. “Seeing our purpose come alive in everyday banking moments has been incredibly rewarding,” Marie says.
She has tapped into her experience in digital transformation and strategy to work closely with teams across the bank. This collaboration has led them to adopt anoperating model that brings speed to market, improves transparency, and strengthens trust. Marie points out that they have progressed from concept, vision, and values to a suite of Shari’ah-compliant digital products with measurable adoption and positive feedback.
“Ultimately, this helped position ruya as a challenger with a clear social purpose, which is grounded in values, delivered through innovation, and felt by our community,” she adds.
A Brief Introduction to ruya
ruya, a digital-first Islamic bank, believes in empowering individuals, businesses, and communities in the UAE so that they can help achieve their goals in life. At this bank, everything starts with these four core values: Prosperity, Integrity, Partnership, and Community. “They are more than words on a wall or on a website,” Marie says. “They are our design principles.”
Prosperity reminds them that growth must be shared, while integrity keeps the bank’s decisions transparent. Partnership, on the other hand, ensures that they co-create solutions with others. The fourth core value, Community, grounds them in empathy, enabling them to understand the everyday lives of the people they serve, according to Marie.
ruya’s mission is to build a digital-first, values-driven Islamic bank that connects purpose with practicality. Marie says that this mission guides every strategic decision of theirs: from products they plan to launch to how they measure success. And they keep the interests of customers at the heart of everything they design. So, feedback flows directly into backlog decisions. This iterative loop ensures they build features people feel are theirs. “Real innovation begins where customer voice leads,” Marie says.
She also says that they balance quantitative market signals with qualitative feedback from their community centres and outreach. This dual input ensures their roadmap focuses on features people need, in addition to remaining faithful to ruya’s mission of fairness, transparency, and social responsibility.
And, Marie points out, from marketing that shapes authentic narratives, to design crafting intuitive journeys, to tech teams ensuring seamless performance, combined with Shari’ah, compliance, operations, and customer-service teams safeguarding trust at every step, each plays a vital role in turning an idea into a lived experience for their customers.
Challenge: Translating Faith-based Principles into Digital Experiences
For Marie, the main challenge has been translating faith-based principles into seamless, modern digital experiences without compromising their authenticity. She addresses this challenge by involving Shari’ah advisors from the start of their product lifecycle. Marie and her team co-create solutions with these advisors, which allows them to move faster while maintaining full integrity.
According to Marie, they have built governance frameworks and design practices that bring transparency; for example, clear pricing, clear intent, and clear profit models. In addition to that, they embed compliance, transparency, and ethical guardrails across every touchpoint.
“For me, compliance is not a constraint but a compass,” Marie says. “It gives direction to how we innovate responsibly.”
Cross-Functional Collaboration
Every initiative of Marie and her team begins and ends with customers. According to Marie, their conversations, design sprints, and decisions are anchored in the question: “How does this create value for our customers and community?”
“Collaboration has meaning only when it leads to better experiences for them,” Marie explains. Therefore, they have built a culture where every person who works at ruya feels a sense of ownership, not only for their deliverables but also for the customer journey as a whole.
“Whether in technology, product, compliance, marketing, or operations, each ruyan understands how their work contributes to the customer experience,” Marie says. “That shared sense of responsibility keeps teams aligned and outcomes focused.”
At ruya, people connect across functions through agile rituals, which facilitate the meeting of diverse expertise with a common purpose. And, Marie says that they use clear, outcomes-based roadmaps so that everyone can see how their efforts move the needle for customers.
“Every Ruyan takes ownership not only of their deliverables, but of the customer promise we have made,” she adds. “Because at ruya, we don’t just deliver products and services, we deliver promises.”
Experiences Shaping Leadership Style
Marie finds inspiration in motion, life, people, and experiences. Her roles as a mother, rallyist, traveller, and volunteer have all influenced her leadership style.
She is a mother of three children. This role has taught her that adaptability, patience, and perspective are not only crucial traits for parenting but also for leadership. She believes that leadership is less about control and more about connection. According to her, every day, her children remind her that curiosity fuels growth and that listening often teaches more than speaking. Both lessons shape how she listens, adapts, and leads teams with understanding rather than instruction.
As a rally driver, Marie has rediscovered the value of preparation before acceleration and the art of staying calm in times of uncertainty. She explains that every race, like every strategy, requires a balance between instinct and discipline, and a steady sense of direction even when the terrain changes. Traveling, another passion of hers, allows her to experience new cultures and gain fresh perspectives on customer needs, innovation, and the human side of finance.
“And through volunteering, I reconnect with purpose,” Marie says, “reminding myself that leadership, at its best, is an act of service.”
These experiences, from motherhood to motorsport and travel to community work, shape how she stays inspired and leads, which is with clarity, resilience, and compassion. Marie says that they also remind her that growth is something to be lived, not planned.
“And ultimately, I see leadership as service,” she adds. “It’s about empowering others to thrive and ensuring that every decision serves a greater purpose.”
Empowerment: Direction and Autonomy
For Marie, empowerment means providing both direction and autonomy. She sums it up as “clarity on the ‘why’ and freedom on the ‘how.’” She believes teams perform best when they understand the larger strategy and are trusted to experiment within it.
“People have clear goals,” she explains. “They want real ownership to ultimately design and deliver solutions that matter.” They want an environment that allows them to experiment, learn from real user feedback, and make decisions close to the customer. As a Scrum Master and a digital transformation expert, Marie is able to create that environment by removing blockers, connecting functions, and ensuring delivery feels purposeful and not mechanical.
“Through agile frameworks, discovery sessions, and ongoing coaching, I help teams see how their work links to community impact,” she says. “True empowerment happens when strategy becomes everyone’s language, not just leadership’s.”
Balancing Innovation and Tradition
Innovation and tradition are often seen as oil and water. But under Marie’s leadership at ruya, they work hand-in-hand as a powerful combination. Marie explains that tradition provides the values and guardrails, while innovation translates them for today’s context.
She says, “I don’t ask, ‘Do we pick one or the other?’ but, ‘How can innovation amplify the values that define us’?” For them, it is about protecting what matters and improving what they can. Marie explains that in practice, transparency turns into clear profit-sharing dashboards, fairness becomes responsible pricing, and community develops into accessible digital channels that serve people wherever they are.
Marie believes that innovation is most powerful when it does not affect values. Instead, it makes those values easier to experience, understand, and trust. “At ruya, we don’t just balance innovation and tradition,” Marie says, “we also blend them to create meaningful progress for our customers.”
Role of Technology
For Marie and her team, technology is more than just an enabler. It is a critical tool that brings simplicity, speed, and trust to every customer interaction. In order to design experiences that are seamless and intuitive, they leverage a digital-first architecture with open APIs and data analytics.
Additionally, according to Marie, the team also prioritises integrations with government-led digital platforms, such as UAE PASS, for secure identity verification and onboarding, and the Al Etihad Credit Bureau (AECB) for instant, consent-based credit insights that allow them to make faster and fairer decisions that benefit customers. “These integrations reduce friction, shorten processing time, and enhance transparency, while keeping data protection and customer trust at the core,” she explains.
And ruya does not develop everything in-house. It partners with leading fintechs and ecosystem players, which helps accelerate capabilities. According to Marie, this collaborative model allows them to deliver modern, compliant products that are human in design. This makes innovation both efficient and ethical at the bank.
“Our goal is not just efficiency but empathy, to use technology that amplifies trust, transparency, and connection across every customer interaction,” Marie says.
Future of Islamic Banking in the Middle East
The global Islamic finance market is projected to grow from $2.3 trillion to $3.5 trillion by 2027, Marie notes. And it is reported that about 71% of customers prefer banks with a positive social impact. Marie also expects the future to be defined by banks that democratise access, simplify complexity, and make ethics tangible.
So, in the Middle East, she believes, the future of Islamic banking will belong to institutions that can merge authenticity with agility. She points out that they will stay true to timeless principles, in addition to delivering modern, human-centred experiences.
“At ruya, we are already shaping that future,” Marie informs. They are demonstrating that an Islamic bank can be both “deeply ethical and refreshingly modern” by grounding every product in Shari’ah principles. They are designing around real customer needs and building digital ecosystems that reflect transparency, fairness, and community. More than that, ruya is redefining what Islamic banking can become.
Marie says that they are evolving their services to meet the rise of ethical-consumer demand and a generation that expects both integrity and innovation. “We are designing for the rapid societal changes and a values-driven future, which comprises transparent pricing, accessible digital hubs, and experiences built on trust,” she adds. “This means not just adapting to change, but also leading it.”
Advice for Aspiring Professionals
Today, many young professionals aspire to step into leadership roles in the Islamic finance sector. Marie advises them to develop a genuine understanding of Islamic finance principles, along with expertise in strategy and governance.
She also encourages them to be humble with tradition, bold with design, and prioritise clarity and ethics. “The sector needs leaders who can bridge jurisprudence, regulation, and user experience,” Marie says.