(Bloomberg) -- The chairman of Israeli lender Bank Leumi Le-Israel BM spoke at an investment conference in Saudi Arabia on Thursday, another sign of steps toward normalization between Israel and the kingdom.

“The potential here is huge,” Samer Haj-Yehia, an Israeli-Arab originally from Taibeh, said at the Future Investment Initiative. He spoke of Saudi Arabia’s thriving economy, tech-savvy youth and high mobile penetration, while noting opportunities in the broader region’s under-banked and un-banked areas.

“We can see that there is a lot of investment going on and we want to tap into that kind of investment, whether it is on the payment side, whether it is in the it is in the crypto currency side, anything we can leverage from the micro-services and the cloud, we would love to do that.”

Saudi Arabia has shunned the Jewish state since its founding in 1948, in solidarity with Palestinians, and continues to insist on a solution to the Palestinian issue before normalizing ties with Israel. Recently, though, there have been signs of a thawing, and Haj-Yehia’s presence on the FII panel is the latest public example of emerging ties between the kingdom and Israel. 

Arab-Israeli citizens make up about 20% of Israel’s population. Muslims from Israel have been allowed to travel to Saudi Arabia for religious pilgrimage, despite the lack of diplomatic ties between the two nations.

“Although he is an Israeli-Arab, and we can’t forget that Israeli Arabs travel to Saudi for the hajj every year, he didn’t come as a Muslim, but as chairman of Bank Leumi Le-Israel, and the name of the bank is meaningful here,” said Shaul Yanai, a Saudi expert at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. “This is part of the ongoing normalization.”

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