The phone calls for help began around the time of the 2008 banking crisis.
As a consultant, David Parrack had been helping people to move their businesses to the Middle East. But as the economic crisis began to dig in, the requests he received started to include pleas from people who were already living abroad.
"I was receiving an awful lot of telephone calls from friends and old colleagues asking if I knew how to solve some of their problems because I have been an expat since 1992," says Mr Parrack, whose 20 years of work as a financial services consultant has taken him to the UAE, Kuwait and Bahrain.
In one case, he helped a friend whose husband had died. The woman, left with children and very little money in the bank, also had to contend with being forced out of her villa.
"I helped quite a bit with that situation," says Mr Parrack.
The experience made him think he might be able to use his connections in the region to help people he did not know but who needed help - and so the idea for Expat Assist was born.
The service started out for British expatriates only but its remit has since been expanded to offer assistance to anyone residing outside their home country.
It has about 1,000 members, nearly 300 of them in the UAE.
Members pay about £120 (Dh711), which buys them help in emergency situations such as arranging a lawyer to urgent medical care.
Expat Assist, which now has six employees, intends to open offices in the UAE and Bahrain, because of the large number of registrations it has received from those countries. Mr Parrack himself divides his time between Dubai and his homeland, the United Kingdom.
The company has helped people in countries including Spain, Singapore and Kenya. The most serious incident took place when a British man who resided in Cyprus suffered a serious heart attack while on a business trip to South Africa.
The medical insurance company at the time flew him back to London, while Expat Assist helped to arrange his family's travel.
"We got a couple of doctors on board who consulted over the telephone with the doctors in South Africa. It turned out that they were actually going to send him to the wrong hospital. It was only because we managed to get a consultant to speak that they referred him to a different hospital," says Mr Parrack.
Here in the UAE Expat Assist has helped expats who have been arrested at the airport because of credit card debt. Expat Assist put them in touch with lawyers.
"In both instances the situation turned out to be better than it probably otherwise would have been. In one of them we highlighted a mistake from the bank, in which case the chap was allowed to go and I think he made his flight," says Mr Parrack.
All the logistical work, such as setting the member up with a lawyer, is covered by the membership fee but other costs such as service fees or flights are over and above.
Mr Parrack says the service helps to give people peace of mind and saves them the hassle of trawling the internet to find a specialist or book a hotel or flight.
But he denies that it is like a concierge service. "That is not what I would necessarily describe it as, no, because we do deal with some pretty horrific situations which would fall very far outside the scope of a concierge service, for sure," he says.
"A guy two weeks ago said it's like breakdown cover for your expat life," he adds. "We have spent a very long time trying to come up with a strapline for Expat Assist. I wouldn't use that, but in layman's terms, it's kind of what we do."
