Financial

Embedded Finance, AI, and Open Banking

Published

12 months ago

February 28, 2025

Integrator Web-Editor

Luc Hovhannessian, Chief Revenue Officer, Treasury & Capital Markets at Finastra

Finastra is driving growth in Treasury & Capital Markets by enabling financial institutions to modernize through cloud-first, open finance solutions. With innovations in AI, ESG-driven finance, and embedded banking, Finastra is shaping the future of financial services, enhancing efficiency, automation, and decision-making.

In which sectors is Finastra experiencing the most significant growth in its client base, and how are you expanding your outreach efforts?

Finastra is witnessing significant growth across our business, and I am seeing this first hand within our Treasury & Capital Markets business unit. A big driving factor is financial institutions recognize that to thrive in today’s environment filled with macroeconomic volatility, regulatory shifts and demands for operational efficiency, they must prioritize modernization and automation, as well as real-time risk management, liquidity forecasting and decision-making. Cloud-first, open, and scalable technology is helping them stay ahead in an unpredictable financial landscape.

Bank treasurers, for example, understand the need for real-time treasury and advanced trading capabilities to navigate today’s challenges and capture the opportunities. With Finastra Kondor, our leading bank treasury management solution, we are enabling institutions to trade high volumes of treasury, complex derivatives and structured products, providing risk analytics and real-time position management. To further support our customers on this journey, we have evolved our solution through enhanced workspaces and workflows to drive greater efficiencies and streamline the decision-making process for banks. We are also leveraging microservices, AI and partner ecosystems to deliver intuitive and persona-based experiences, as well as Treasury as a Service (TaaS) and cloud capabilities.

Additionally, we have numerous customers that have implemented Opics, our simplified, integrated core treasury solution. The solution ensures institutions can adopt cost-effective treasury operations while increasing their revenue, improving customer service and staying compliant.

The capital markets space is another promising area, as firms seek scalable, efficient platforms. With Summit, backed by over 25 years of industry expertise, we’re helping institutions streamline trading, improve straight-through processing (STP), and reduce time to market, making operations more efficient and cost-effective.

Finally, we are seeing strong growth from the investment management industry, particularly as insurance companies and pension funds expand to the point of needing a robust technology system. Fusion Invest provides real-time portfolio insights, advanced analytics, and automated investment processes through an Investment Book of Records (IBOR). With comprehensive asset class coverage and cloud-enabled deployment, we’re giving institutions the flexibility to manage risk and align with strategic goals.

We are continuing to embrace the growth opportunities in the treasury and capital markets industries by providing ongoing engagement and support for our existing customers, some of whom who have used our solutions for many years. We are using our successes and learnings to engage new customers, and we have some exciting projects on the horizon.

How is Finastra leveraging the potential of open finance, and what does the future of open finance look like from your perspective?

The treasury and capital markets industries are evolving rapidly, with financial institutions seeking greater efficiency, scalability, and sustainability. Finastra has long championed an open financial landscape, supporting some of the world’s largest banks and investment firms with solutions designed for automation, real-time decision-making, and seamless collaboration.

For example, in treasury trading, banks must optimize operations and integrate with market services to create a stable financial ecosystem. This allows them to respond quickly to regulatory changes and promote growth in global and local markets. Our open solutions enable seamless, real-time integration by leveraging REST APIs, allowing interactive, two-way integration with external applications, meaning banks can innovate and adapt to market changes rapidly.

Institutions require solutions that optimize the trading of high-quality liquid assets and enable cost-effective treasury operations from front to back. Our open solutions address these challenges and facilitate collaboration across the financial ecosystem. By offering advanced systems for secure data processing and analysis, they allow banks to utilize their data more effectively for decision-making. Additionally, these platforms address bias through analytics, training, and automated decision-making tools, while ensuring compliance with evolving regulations.

Similarly, robust capital markets platforms that are open by design support investment banks with trade validations, portfolio management, and real-time pricing. Finastra’s front-to-back solutions aid debt raising and risk management for institutions to drive growth and foster societal change.

Capital markets face challenges like slow trade validations, complex risk management for development banks, adapting to new technologies, and supporting diverse financial products. We’re solving these challenges by offering agile solutions that speed up trade validations and provide robust risk management solutions. Open architecture allows for easy integration and promotes innovation, while real-time tools and specialized solutions can improve portfolio management and the handling of various financial products.

The future of Open Finance lies in greater data-sharing, stronger partnerships, and scalable innovation. As financial institutions embrace cloud-driven ecosystems, the ability to integrate, collaborate, and innovate will define long-term success.

Can you elaborate on your software solutions and how they contribute to supporting green finance? Is the shift toward sustainable finance becoming a tangible reality?

Sustainable, inclusive and responsible finance is moving from ambition to reality as institutions embed ESG principles into their operations. Demand for green bonds, sustainability-linked loans, and ESG-driven investments is rising, and technology is at the heart of this transition. Finastra offers a variety of solutions to support this, including Finastra ESG Service offered within our Lending business unit. The cloud-native, open and scalable solution facilitates the integration of ESG performance criteria into risk and pricing to deliver a better experience for sustainability-linked loans and bonds.

In the treasury and capital markets space, as institutions integrate ESG factors into decision-making, investors can achieve financial returns while contributing to positive societal and environmental outcomes. The demand for ESG-focused investments is growing, with institutional investors like pension funds and insurance companies incorporating ESG criteria to meet stakeholder expectations. Investors use ESG criteria to identify risks affecting long-term performance, such as regulatory fines for poor environmental practices or the reduced likelihood of scandals due to strong governance.

With real-time treasury and trading solutions, banks can access more accurate forecasting and risk management capabilities, while enabling faster decision-making and greater agility to navigate any complexities. Additionally, our Fusion Invest solution is integrated with ESG data to help asset managers make more informed decisions about their portfolios in line with specific values.

Cloud-enabled ecosystems, such as Finastra’s, further support the adoption of sustainable finance. Powered by Open Finance, these ecosystems foster seamless collaboration and partnerships to drive innovation and positive societal change. By integrating third party applications that provide, for example, sustainable datasets or seamless compliance with disclosure requirements, banks can embrace the opportunities of ESG while mitigating potential risks.

Finally, as Generative AI (Gen AI) brings new opportunities for green finance. By analysing vast amounts of historical and real-time data, Gen AI can help firms assess market sentiment, track policy changes, and identify ESG-aligned opportunities. At Finastra, we are investing heavily in Gen AI across our operations and within our products and are excited about what the future has in store.

Embedded finance is a buzzword across the financial landscape—can you explain its significance and the role generative AI plays in shaping its evolution?

Embedded finance gained popularity because of the way it seeks to transform the end user experience. By integrating banking capabilities directly into non-financial platforms, payments, lending, investment and banking services can become more intuitive and accessible. It’s about putting the end user’s needs first, and building products and services around that, to be consumed how and when they want them. Our Treasury & Capital Markets solutions can be easily connected with an end user’s platform, enabling businesses to offer investment opportunities directly to end clients.

In a similar vein, Gen AI is making a significant impact due to its transformative potential in enriching user experiences. By enhancing employee productivity, it can free up time to focus on more value-added, customer-facing tasks. With large language models and AI assistants, information can be accessed at our fingertips to support faster and potentially more informed decisions. For example, a trader could request a summary of all FX spot trades issued that day and run APIs to automate tasks such as booking trades and calculating risk measures.

Market volatility is accelerating this demand. Institutions must react quickly to economic shifts, regulatory changes, and shifting demands. Gen AI can ingest large volumes of historical and real-time data—from central bank policies to social sentiment—to generate precise risk assessments and liquidity insights. These capabilities are particularly valuable for instant investment decisions, automated trading, and dynamic pricing models.

However, Gen AI’s adoption also comes with challenges. Data quality, governance, and regulatory compliance are critical to ensuring AI models remain transparent and reliable. Financial institutions must continuously refine robust measures and processes to maintain trust and accountability.

How is Finastra supporting financial organizations with cloud services, and what innovations can we expect in this space?

Cloud technology is at the heart of modernization strategies, enabling institutions to reduce costs, increase agility, and accelerate time to market. We are helping banks and investment firms adopt our scalable, cloud-based solutions to improve operations, strengthen risk management, and adapt to shifting market conditions. Additionally, as regulations continue to evolve and become more stringent, cloud-based solutions provided the necessary agility for institutions to quickly comply.

Modernization is about more than just migrating to the cloud. By offering managed services in collaboration with our partners, such as DXC Luxoft and RightClick Solutions, banks gain additional benefits in terms of operational efficiency and maintenance support. We are also helping our customers adopt microservices-based architecture, enabling them to select and integrate the specific functionalities they need, while minimizing the risks of large-scale legacy migrations.

As our solutions are API-enabled, this further enhances adaptability by enabling seamless connections of banking systems with fintech innovations and external data sources. With cloud-enabled, Open Finance ecosystems combined with technological innovations such as Gen AI, we can expect a lot more collaboration and innovation to come, which ultimately can provide better end-user outcomes.

Financial

GCC TRANSFER PRICING TIGHTENS IN 2026 AS ENFORCEMENT MATURES

Published

4 days ago

February 6, 2026

Integrator Web-Editor

Executive from Dhruva Consultants standing in a modern office corridor, wearing a dark business suit and red tie, with glass meeting rooms and workspaces in the background.

Dhruva, a tax advisory firm with deep expertise across the Middle East, and global markets, stated that the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) is at a clear inflection point in its fiscal evolution. Transfer pricing is moving beyond first-wave rulemaking into an enforcement-led environment where it is increasingly treated as a core element of corporate governance.

Drawing on the UAE Year in Review 2025 report recently launched by Dhruva, the region is moving past inaugural filing seasons and confronting the limits of reactive, post-facto compliance. “The past year has been transformative, representing not merely technical adjustments but a strategic recalibration of the region’s economic architecture,” said Nimish Goel, Leader, Middle East at Dhruva. In this environment, the behavioral reality of a business must align with its legal documentation, as tax authorities raise expectations around demonstrable economic substance.

A central theme in this scrutiny is Key Management Personnel (KMP). Where decision-making occurs, who exercises control, and how governance is evidenced are becoming determinative factors in how profits are attributed and defended. Inconsistencies across HR contracts, organization charts, board minutes, operational reality, and transfer pricing files are increasingly treated as a credibility gap, not a documentation error.

This recalibration is being accelerated by a shift in audit approach. Tax authorities across the GCC are moving from form-based reviews to more sophisticated, data-led scrutiny. Kapil Bhatnagar, Partner at Dhruva, stated that, “A key focus is the ‘invisible backbone’ of many regional groups, common-control and related-party transactions that sit at the heart of multilayered conglomerate structures. Informal arrangements historically treated as low-risk are increasingly being evaluated through an arm’s length lens, including interest-free shareholder loans, uncharged centralized services, legacy intercompany balances, and balance-sheet support. For forward-looking organisations, transfer pricing is no longer a compliance obligation but a strategic enabler.”

In parallel, the UAE has signaled stricter arm’s length expectations for Qualifying Free Zone Persons, with transfer pricing increasingly functioning as the mechanism through which substance is demonstrated under the Corporate Tax regime.

The stakes are further elevated by Pillar Two global minimum tax developments. Effective 2025, most GCC jurisdictions, including the UAE, Qatar, and Bahrain, either implemented or were in the final stages of implementing Domestic Minimum Top-up Taxes (DMTT). Under these rules, intercompany pricing can no longer be treated purely as a compliance variable, since it can materially influence a group’s effective tax rate and potential top-up exposure.

“In response, leading groups are shifting toward operational transfer pricing, embedding pricing policies into ERP workflows to improve year-round accuracy, data integrity, and audit readiness. This is increasingly relevant as audits begin to rely more heavily on data analytics, ERP trails, and transaction-level evidence, with deeper linkage expected between transfer pricing documentation, financial statements, tax returns, and support evidence,” added Kapil.

At the same time, demand is rising for certainty and dispute-prevention mechanisms, including Advance Pricing Agreements (APAs) and Mutual Agreement Procedures (MAPs), particularly for complex cross-border arrangements where predictability is commercially valuable. The UAE has already established a formal framework for clarifications and directives including APAs, confirmed unilateral APA applications from Q4 2025, and introduced a schedule of APA fees effective from January 1, 2026.

As the region moves into its next phase of maturity, Kapil concluded, “The message is clear, the era of fixing and filing is over. The era of governance, digitization, and transparency has begun.”

Financial

RETHINKING THE FUTURE OF VENTURE CAPITAL IN AN AI-DRIVEN WORLD

Published

3 weeks ago

January 20, 2026

Integrator Web-Editor

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.

Financial

UAE MOVES TOWARDS A MORE COMPLIANCE-FOCUSED TAX LANDSCAPE WITH RECENT VAT REFORMS: DHRUVA

Published

2 months ago

December 25, 2025

Integrator Web-Editor

Person wearing a dark gray business suit with a white dress shirt and a textured purple tie, standing against a plain gray background

Dhruva, a premier tax advisory firm with deep expertise across the Middle East, India, and Asia, stated that the UAE’s latest amendments to the VAT Law and the Tax Procedures Law, issued by the Federal Tax Authority (FTA) which are effective from 1 January 2026, represent a significant shift toward a more structured, and risk-focused tax environment. These amendments are expected to reinforce responsible compliance behaviors and reduce administrative friction for UAE businesses.

Dhruva noted that one of the most practical and welcoming changes is that it eliminates the requirement for taxpayers to self-issue tax invoices for imports subject to the reverse charge mechanism, which provides a lot of ease to businesses. Post series of amendments and clarifications issued by the FTA in 2025 in relation to self-issuance of tax invoices for imports, while a general exception was granted for such requirement for import of services, the same were required in case of import of goods for record-keeping purposes. This often-added administrative complexity without impacting the actual tax liability or input tax entitlement. Under the updated rules, taxable businesses have removed the obligation entirely, and hence, businesses will only need to maintain standard supporting documentation, such as invoices, contracts, and transaction records.

However, the firm highlighted that while some administrative burdens are being eased, compliance expectations are tightening elsewhere. One of the amendments gives the FTA authority to deny input tax recovery in cases linked to tax evasion – where a taxpayer knew or, critically, should have known, that a supply or its broader supply chain was connected to tax evasion. The law clarifies that taxpayers will be deemed to have been aware if they fail to verify the validity and integrity of the supply in accordance with procedures to be issued by the FTA.

Dhruva explained that historically, the responsibility to account for VAT rested primarily with the supplier, and recipients focused mainly on validating the tax invoice and meeting standard input-tax recovery conditions. In practice, however, the FTA has often linked a recipient’s input-tax eligibility to the supplier’s discharge of output VAT, denying recovery where gaps existed. The latest amendment now formally embeds this position in law, imposing additional due-diligence obligations on the recipient.

Ujjwal Pawra, Partner at Dhruva Consultants, commented, “This is a significant change. It is a clear message that the right to input tax recovery comes with the responsibility to validate the integrity of one’s suppliers and supply chain. Businesses must now demonstrate that they exercised practical, documented, and consistent due diligence. Clean invoices alone are no longer enough; what matters is a clean process.”

While the procedures and conditions are awaited, Dhruva advised that companies reassess onboarding procedures, supplier-vetting protocols, and documentation trails to ensure they align with the FTA’s expected standards.

Another material operational change is the introduction of a defined timeframe to act on credit balances. Under the amended framework, businesses will generally have up to five years from the end of the relevant tax period to request a refund of a credit balance or use that balance to settle tax liabilities, with targeted flexibility in specified cases where credits arise late in the cycle.

Transitional relief is also available for certain older credits around the changeover, which can help businesses address legacy positions in an orderly way. Dhruva said these changes reduce the risk of credits remaining unresolved on the balance sheet, improve cash flow planning, and encourage clearer internal ownership of refund positions.

Ujjwal further added, “The UAE has introduced a more robust operating framework for credit balances and refunds in line with international best practices. The message is simple: know your credits, map the deadlines, and file claims that are clear, complete, consistent, and easy to validate.”

Dhruva advised UAE businesses to act now with a finance-led approach. This starts with building a central credit-balance register by tax type and tax period, assigning an accountable owner, and tracking action dates so credits are either utilised or claimed in time. Businesses should also treat refund submissions as audit-ready files by preparing reconciliations, supporting documents, and a concise explanation of how the credit arose and why the amount is correct before submitting, rather than rebuilding the file after queries begin. In parallel, companies should prioritise older credit positions to assess whether they fall within the transitional relief window and avoid last-minute filings.

The firm also advised businesses to monitor any binding directions issued by the FTA and align their tax positions, documentation, and system settings accordingly to minimize interpretational differences and strengthen consistency over time.