By Fraser Nelson, Head of Global Business Development, Scope Markets

The UAE stands at the forefront of a digital financial revolution, where innovation in retail trading platforms is rapidly reshaping how individuals’ access and participate in financial markets. New technologies are enabling broader market access, deeper analytics, and personalised experiences for investors across demographics. Yet with these advancements comes the critical need to balance innovation with trust, ensuring that technological progress enhances investor confidence and long-term market participation, not just speed and convenience.

Expanding Access Through Technological Innovation

Recent developments in the UAE capital markets illustrate how digital innovation is transforming investor access. For example, the Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange (ADX) welcomed Thndr as its first remote retail trading member, enabling millions of users to trade securities and exchange-traded funds directly via a fully digital platform without physical presence in the UAE. This milestone broadens participation and underscores the role of technology in reducing barriers to entry for retail investors.

Similarly, market infrastructure upgrades including new order types and enhanced trading systems are designed to make price discovery and execution more efficient for both institutional and retail participants. These enhancements reflect a broader strategy to deepen market reach and usability.

Regulatory Frameworks as Anchors of Trust

As platforms evolve, regulators in the UAE continue to play a central role in safeguarding investor interests while fostering innovation. The UAE Securities and Commodities Authority (SCA) has introduced federal licensing for robo-advisory services, aiming to enhance transparency, risk disclosure, and operational governance for platforms that deliver automated investment advice. This regulatory clarity helps ensure that digital advice tools serve investors with appropriate protection and predictable standards.

Across financial centres such as the Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC) and the Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM), regulators are also modernising authorisation and engagement processes. For example, the DFSA’s new digital portal is designed to streamline compliance workflows and better support firms seeking licencing; a move that signals regulatory commitment to both innovation and oversight.

These regulatory efforts strengthen trust by providing clear expectations and oversight mechanisms, which in turn encourage responsible innovation by market participants.

Investor Adoption and Experience in a Digital Age

Technology isn’t only reshaping how markets operate, it’s influencing how individuals make decisions. Surveys indicate that a significant portion of UAE retail investors use artificial intelligence tools, such as recommendation engines or AI-driven research assistants, to shape their portfolios. This engagement with technology reflects a growing comfort with digital decision-making but also highlights the importance of education and digital literacy in using these tools wisely.

Platforms that offer intuitive interfaces and data-driven insights can enhance investor experience, but they must also provide clear explanations of risks, fees, and realistic performance expectations. This transparency builds trust and prevents misconceptions that can arise from overreliance on algorithmic signals or social media sentiment.

The Trust Imperative: Security, Transparency, and Education

Innovation without trust is unsustainable. In financial services, trust stems from robust cybersecurity, transparent pricing and disclosures, and investor education. Safe digital environments require ongoing investments in secure systems, data protection, and customer-centric design not only to protect assets but also to reinforce confidence in digital channels.

Platforms and regulators alike must prioritise straightforward communication about how tools work, what risks they entail, and how investors can make informed decisions. Equally, investors benefit from continuously improving their understanding of market mechanics, regulation, and technology through credible educational resources.

Conclusion: A Balanced Path Forward

The future of retail trading platforms in the UAE is shaped by a dynamic interplay between technological innovation and regulatory safeguards. The integration of digital access, advanced analytics, and automated services offers unprecedented opportunities for individual investors. At the same time, trust anchored in transparent practices, strong oversight, and investor empowerment will determine whether these innovations translate into sustainable market engagement.

As the UAE’s financial ecosystem matures, success will belong to platforms and participants that prioritise innovation with responsibility. By embracing both cutting-edge technology and enduring principles of trust, the market can offer inclusive, efficient, and secure avenues for wealth creation that stand the test of time.

By Rakshit Choudhary, CEO, Deriv

The first weeks of 2026 have made one thing clear. AI is no longer moving in steps, it is moving in leaps. Across the Middle East and globally, organisations are spending hundreds of billions on AI, yet most will fail to see a lasting advantage. This isn’t a technology failure, it’s an architectural one. They are using 2026 intelligence to automate 2016 processes that shouldn’t exist in the first place.

One question separates genuine transformation from expensive automation. If you were building this business from scratch today, how would you design it?

 The asymmetry of the legacy burden

Established companies face a challenge startups do not. Every advantage built over time eventually hardens into a constraint. Processes reflect historical decisions made years ago, and systems are optimised for legacy technology.

A startup building your business today wouldn’t carry your infrastructure or justify changes to existing teams; they would simply build what makes sense now. This creates a painful reality where startups move faster not because they are smarter, but because they don’t have to preserve a museum.

At Deriv, we faced this asymmetry head-on. We had to redesign our entire foundation while maintaining over $650 billion in monthly trading volume for 3 million clients. It is the equivalent of building a new aeroplane while flying at 35,000 feet.

Designing for intelligence, not compensating for its absence

Most organisations approach AI by asking, “What can AI do for us?”. That is the wrong question. It leads to incrementalism, existing workflows executed slightly faster.

When we applied “startup thinking” to Deriv, we stopped treating AI as a tool and started treating it as a design constraint:

• Customer service: The answer wasn’t faster scripts, but an AI agent with direct system access. Our agent, Amy, now handles 79% of customer chats globally with 97% satisfaction.
• Engineering: We didn’t just ask for more “copilots.” We built for AI-generated code with built-in quality controls. Today, over 50% of our code is AI-generated, putting us ahead of most software firms in a regulated environment.

Every time we asked the “startup question,” we discovered that legacy processes were designed around constraints that no longer existed. Technology limitations from a decade ago or organisational structures reflecting a much smaller company.

The investment that actually matters: Readiness

AI capability is no longer the bottleneck. Access to breakthroughs is now commoditised and available across markets as quickly as it emerges. The real constraint is organisational readiness.

The most valuable investment we made in 2025 wasn’t software, it was people. We have hired over 100 AI engineers to build AI-native operations, but we also upskilled our existing global workforce. This wasn’t about teaching them to use a chatbot, it was about changing their AI literacy so they instinctively ask if a process should exist at all.

The widening gap

We are at a critical inflection point. Product lifecycles and release timelines that took months now happen in weeks. Companies that redesign workflows for autonomous systems will benefit automatically as AI improves. New capabilities will integrate without disruption.

Conversely, those automating legacy processes will find themselves trapped in a cycle of continuous, expensive rebuilding. By mid-2026, this gap will become permanent.

The startup question isn’t comfortable. It challenges every inherited assumption. But for businesses operating in sophisticated, highly regulated markets, it is the only question that leads to growth rather than mere efficiency.

The time to ask the startup question is now.

Dara Campbell, Senior Executive Officer, Hashgraph Ventures Manager

Venture capital isn’t what it used to be and that’s a good thing. The old playbook of “spray and pray,” waiting a decade for liquidity, and celebrating paper mark-ups is a thing of the past. In 2026, our industry is becoming faster, leaner, more intentional, and, ironically, deeply human.

We are standing at the intersection of the two most powerful technological waves of our generation: digital assets and artificial intelligence. This is not to say that these are the trending sectors for investment, but it is rather that funding the financial and digital infrastructure will define how value moves, how intelligence is deployed, and who ultimately owns the systems we will depend on.

We need to collectively acknowledge that programmable money and machine learning will be the drivers of the next generation of wealth. We are entering into an era where AI will help allocate, transact, and streamline capital in a faster and more efficient and adaptive way.

The most agile founders we see today are building with intent, efficiency, and transparency. They are building solutions in payments, logistics, supply chains, identity, and data ownership using real time AI infrastructure with blockchain rails underneath. When these two levels come together, you unlock productivity and scale in a way the traditional systems still can’t process.

Despite all this advancement, at its core venture capital remains a people-centric business. The biggest edge is access to conviction. When you meet a founder who can articulate why they are building something, not just what they are building, that’s where the signal lies. In my experience, the best investors will be those who can recognize that clarity early, match the founder’s passion, and stay in the trenches long after the initial cheque is written.

This is where the transformation is starting to show. As we move into 2026, we are also entering a new phase of infrastructure and DeFi 2.0. The dull layers – the rails, the protocols, the identity frameworks are becoming the foundation for this shift. From AI agents paying autonomously to real-world assets being tokenized at scale, these systems will underpin the next wave of innovation.

This is where Abu Dhabi is making strides on the global venture landscape. The emirate has rapidly emerged as a serious capital hub because it understands alignment. They are not replicating an ecosystem that’s been done before and has been successful – they are building something from the ground up that works for the region, for the new era of investors who are riding the wave of innovation.

The next generation of investors will be those who can successfully practice agility within the realm of regulation and who can integrate AI without compromising on the power of human instincts. The future of venture capital isn’t about replacing humans with machines; it’s about embedding systems in place where these two elements amplify each other. It’s a delicate balance, but that’s where the outliers are built.