Welcome Remarks from the Chief Executive Officer of Bahrain Bourse: Sh. Khalifa Bin Ebrahim Al Khalifa

Welcome Remarks from the Secretary General of the Arab Federation of Capital Markets: Rami El Dokany

Welcome Remarks from the President & Chief Content Officer of A-Team Group: Andrew Delaney

Regulator Keynote

Panel 1: Market data and beyond: Data integration and management in a world of Big Data

• How are market participants ensuring they have access to the right market data and other information services to meet their trading needs and regulatory obligations?
• What are today’s best practices for integrating and managing market data services?
• What opportunity is there for regional players to adopt cloud-delivered services?
  

Sameh Baqer, Group Head – Financial Markets Sales and Structuring, Ahli United Bank
Mohamed Ismail, Head of Sales – Data Solutions EMEA, LSEG
Aneesh Mohan, Senior Solutions Architect, Amazon Web Services
Issa Al-Issa, Chief of Business Development, Wamid

Panel 2: Leveraging Financial Markets to Deliver Sustainable Growth

• How can financial institutions and industry utilities like exchanges and clearing houses ensure they are well prepared to operate effectively in the emerging environment of the modern financial ecosystem?
• How would the new tools in the market allow investors to track companies’ commitments to sustainability?
• What is the role of standards for ensuring firms are complying with applicable regulations?
• How important are data providers and their solutions to exchanges and other financial institutions?
• What about rating and ranking methodologies for listed companies in their ESG profile?
• What are the data management challenges of dealing with so many data sources, often in unstructured format?

Osama Ben Saleh Bukhari, Head of the Banking Commission, ICC Saudi Arabia
Duncan Johnston-Watt, CEO & Co-Founder, Paravela
Marwa AlMaskati, Senior Director of Partnership Development, Sustainability & Communications, Bahrain Bourse

Panel 3: Exchange systems, DMA hosting and connectivity

• What approaches are the region’s exchange taking to trading platform modernisation?
• What options to trading firms have for hosting to support their DMA systems?
• How are firms ensuring the integrity of their data connections for orders and market data?
• What tools can firms use to ensure their connections are performant?
• How are firms dealing with adding cloud to the mix of connectivity options?

Samer Abuzahra, Chief Commercial Officer, 180 Capital
Saker Asllan, Chief Operations Officer, Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange
Faisal Dada, Director of Product Management – NTSG, AMD

Presentation

Panel 4: Addressing market abuse – Lessons learned from implementing surveillance systems for voice and electronic trading communications

• How are market participants addressing market abuse concerns across the region?
• What has been the regulators’ stance on market abuse to date?
• What’s the outlook for 2024/25?
• What are the key considerations for addressing insider trading and other trading-related financial crime?
• What commercial options are open to surveillance teams in the MENA region?

Andrew Delaney, President & Chief Content Officer, A-Team Group
Ehsan Husain, Group Head – Investments, Ahli United Bank

Panel 5: Next-generation OMS & EMS: OEMS and smart order routing

• How are pan-regional firms deploying OMS and EMS systems?
• What are the relative merits of local/regional vs. global solutions?
• How does the advent of the combined OEMS impact connectivity issues?
• Which markets are driving OMS/EMS/OEMS adoption in the region?
• What does the end-game look like for OMS/EMS/SOR?

Mohammed Ibrahim, Head of Information Technology, SICO Bank
Seif Amr, Co-Founder and COO, Thndr
Samer Abuzahra, Chief Commercial Officer, 180 Capital
Alastair Richardson, Global Business Development, Financial Technology, AMD

Fireside Chat: The challenges and opportunities of AI in trading

Interview with: Justin Xu, Head of Risk, Millennium
Interviewed by: Andrew Delaney, President & Chief Content Officer, A-Team Group

Panel 6: Modernising the post-trade work flow

• What is the impact for the global industry of moving to T+1 Settlement?
• How is MENA affected?
• What are the operational challenges of moving to a shortened settlement cycle and what do firms need to do to prepare?
• What is the role of distributed ledger technologies?
• How can automation and innovative technologies help improve post trade processes and workflows?
• What are the expected benefits for firms of moving to T+1 and what does the future look like?

Abdulla Abdin, Chief Operating Officer, Bahrain Clear
Gunsel Topbas, Co-Founder & Managing Partner, Manifest Executive Consultancy