FinTech has been enthusiastically adopted by local banks but the Middle East region is lagging behind on Regtech investment, warned Wissam Fattouh, who is also Chairman of the MENA Financial Crime Compliance Group. Speaking at a MENA Regulatory Summit in March, Fattouh urged greater investment in regtech applications, without which he warned that firms would be more exposed to cyber security risks and financial crime.
As rising geopolitical uncertainty prompts an intensification in the complexity and volume of global economic and financial sanctions, banks and financial institutions are faced with a daunting set of new compliance challenges. The risk of inadvertently engaging with sanctioned securities has never been higher and the penalties for doing so are harsh. Traditional sanctions screening...
2026 regulatory themes are converging around the theme of continuous evidence – data quality, control effectiveness, and operational resilience demonstrated through repeatable artefacts rather than narrative attestations. In Europe, that direction is most explicit in ESMA’s data platform and supervisory tooling agenda, alongside the ESAs’ DORA-related coordination and oversight planning – see ESMA 2026 Annual...
Now in its 3rd year, the AI in Capital Markets Summit returns with a focus on the practicalities of onboarding AI enterprise wide for business value creation. Whilst AI offers huge potential to revolutionise capital markets operations many are struggling to move beyond pilot phase to generate substantial value from AI.
AI adoption in capital markets has moved into a more disciplined phase. The priority is now controlled deployment: where AI can be used safely, where it can deliver measurable value, and how outputs can be governed, monitored and evidenced. The 2026 edition of the AI in Capital Markets Handbook examines how AI is being applied...
