Henry Dannell, a specialist cross-border credit adviser, has announced its expansion into the Middle East with the opening of a representative office in Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC), marking a significant milestone in the firm’s international growth strategy.

The move reflects rising demand for specialist advice among internationally mobile individuals whose financial interests increasingly span multiple jurisdictions, asset classes, and lending structures. As Dubai continues to strengthen its position as a global wealth and investment hub, attracting entrepreneurs, family offices, investors, and high-net-worth individuals from around the world, the complexity of managing wealth across borders has increased significantly. Many of these individuals now live, work, invest, and hold assets internationally, creating borrowing requirements that often extend beyond conventional lending frameworks.

Henry Dannell’s expansion into Dubai is designed to bring the firm’s specialist expertise closer to the region’s growing network of wealth advisers, family offices, tax specialists, legal professionals, and internationally connected clients.

Founded in 2019, Henry Dannell has built a reputation for delivering bespoke credit and lending solutions for clients with highly sophisticated financial circumstances. The firm’s advisers support a broad spectrum of clients, from business owners and entrepreneurs to ultra-high-net-worth individuals, helping them navigate complex borrowing scenarios that frequently involve multiple jurisdictions, unconventional income structures, and international assets. Unlike traditional mortgage providers, Henry Dannell operates as a specialist advisory business focused on structuring tailored credit solutions and working alongside trusted professional advisers to address complex financing requirements.

The establishment of the DIFC representative office represents the first phase of the company’s broader regional growth ambitions and will serve as a hub for relationship-building, market engagement, and collaboration with professional advisory communities across the Middle East.

Kem Kemal, CEO and Co-Founder of Henry Dannell, said: “Over the last decade, we have seen a fundamental shift in how wealth is created, managed, and deployed. Successful individuals are increasingly global in their outlook. They may operate businesses in one country, hold investments in another, and seek opportunities across several markets simultaneously. Yet lending has not always evolved at the same pace.”

He explained that too often, highly accomplished individuals with substantial assets and strong financial positions encounter challenges because their circumstances fall outside conventional frameworks. “Our role is to understand the complete picture and design bespoke solutions that reflect the realities of modern international wealth.”

“Dubai has become one of the most important centers for global capital, entrepreneurship and wealth advisory services,” he added. “Establishing a presence within DIFC allows us to be closer to the professional advisers and internationally connected clients we serve, while strengthening relationships across a region that continues to play an increasingly influential role in global finance.”

With over 165 years of combined industry experience across its advisory team, Henry Dannell has developed specialist expertise across residential, commercial, and specialist lending transactions. Through its Dubai presence, Henry Dannell aims to deepen engagement with the region’s professional advisory ecosystem while contributing to discussions around international wealth, investment, and cross-border financial planning.

The UAE’s net wealth grew by 12.7% between 2024 and 2025, rising from $3.2 trillion to $3.6 trillion, according to Boston Consulting Group’s (BCG) Global Wealth Report 2026: The Great Reordering. Total Net wealth is forecast to reach $6 trillion by 2030, with a CAGR of 10.6%. This represents an increase of more than $2.3 trillion over the next five years. The projected growth points to the UAE’s long-term wealth creation potential. 

Financial wealth, including both investable and non-investable wealth, grew by 12.3% between 2024 and 2025, rising from $1.2 trillion to $1.4 trillion and is set to rise to $2.1 trillion by 2030 at a CAGR of 8.7%. Real assets reached $2.4 trillion in 2025 from $2.2 trillion in 2024, with projected growth to $4.2 trillion by 2030.

The findings show the resilience of the UAE wealth market amid a volatile global environment and heightened geopolitical uncertainty. “The ongoing conflict has introduced short-term volatility across Middle Eastern markets, with investor sentiment shaped by geopolitical uncertainty and oil-price movements,” said Lukasz Rey, Managing Director and Partner at BCG. “However, the region’s wealth development story remains structurally resilient over the five-year projection horizon. While we anticipate slightly lower growth over the next one to two years, a rebound is expected toward the latter part of the decade, supported by sovereign wealth strength, economic diversification agendas, family-business liquidity events, and continued private capital activity. We expect wealth managers to remain cautious in the near term; however, the long-term wealth opportunity in the Middle East remains intact.”

The report identifies a broader reordering underway across the global wealth-management industry, spanning geographic shifts, emerging-market wealth creation, intergenerational succession, and AI-driven operating model transformation.

Shifting Wealth Concentration Across UAE Population Segments

According to the report, the UAE’s financial wealth remains concentrated among high-net-worth individuals, with the composition of wealth expected to evolve by 2030 as more wealth accumulates within the lower high-net-worth segment. There are approximately 500 ultra-high-net-worth (UHNW) individuals, those with more than US$100 million in assets, in 2025, and they are expected to increase to around 800 by 2030, while their share of total financial wealth rises marginally from 26.3% to 26.5%. The upper high-net-worth segment (US$20–100 million) is forecasted to grow from approximately 2.7K to 4.2K individuals, with its share of wealth broadly stable at 7.4% in 2025 to 7.6% in 2030.

In contrast, the lower high-net-worth segment (US$1–20 million), which comprises approximately 200K individuals, is expected to increase its share of financial wealth from 29.3% in 2025 to 31.5% in 2030. The affluent segment (US$0.25–1 million) is expected to expand from approximately 500K to 600K individuals in 2030, while its share of wealth declines from 15.5% to 14.6% as wealth disperses across a larger base. The mass segment (below US$0.25 million) remains the largest by population, growing from roughly 8.6M to 9M individuals, but its share of financial wealth decreases from 21.5% to 19.8%.

The key UAE findings of BCG’s proprietary analysis are:

• Financial wealth reaches $1.4 trillion in 2025, with strong projected growth to $2.1 trillion by 2030 (CAGR: 8.7%)
• Real assets rose to $2.4 trillion in 2025 and are expected to hit $4.2 trillion by 2030 (CAGR: 11.5%)
• Liabilities climbed to $220 billion in 2025 from $210 billion in 2024, with projections indicating $340 billion by 2030 (CAGR: 8.9%)
• Cross-border financial wealth belonging to UAE residents and booked outside the UAE surged by 9.4% between 2024 and 2025 in the UAE, reaching $468.4 billion. It is forecasted to grow to $678.2 billion by 2030 with a CAGR of 7.7%.
• Separately, the UAE continues to strengthen its position as a global wealth booking center, with cross-border wealth belonging to international clients and booked in the country reaching $721 billion in 2025, up 11.1% year-on-year.
• Currency & Deposits, valued at $471.8 billion in 2025, is projected to grow to $778.9 billion by 2030, with a CAGR of 10.5%
• Bonds are expected to reach $27.8 billion by 2030 from $15.9 billion in 2025, with a CAGR of 11.8%
• Equities, valued at $419.4 billion in 2025, are expected to reach $591.9 billion by 2030 at a CAGR of 7.1%
• Life Insurance & Pensions are valued at $26.6 billion in 2025 and projected to grow to $48.4 billion by 2030 (CAGR: 12.7%)

AI Is Reshaping the Economics of Wealth Management 

BCG’s report finds that AI is beginning to reshape wealth-management economics and operating models. AI-powered tools are already drafting financial plans, automating compliance documentation, generating portfolio rationales, and predicting client churn. According to BCG analysis, AI-first wealth managers could unlock 25%–30% capacity gains across key workflows while increasing revenue per advisor by 15%–20%. The report argues that the industry is approaching a structural divide between firms redesigning workflows around AI agents and those layering AI tools onto legacy processes. 

“The UAE’s wealth pool is set to grow by more than $2 trillion over the next five years, and the constraint on capturing that growth is advisor capacity rather than client demand,” said Mohammad Khan, Managing Director and Partner at BCG. “Firms that are redesigning their workflows around AI agents are creating the headroom to serve a larger client base without diluting the quality of advice. Those layering AI onto legacy processes are paying for the technology without changing their economics, and that gap widens the longer it is left.”

Wealth managers face a choice between adapting incrementally and committing to an AI-first future, with the report identifying the latter as the more sustainable approach. Key priorities include:

• Map value chain exposure: Identify rules-based, templatized processes most vulnerable to automation. Distinguish truly bespoke, relationship-dependent work from structured, repeatable tasks to guide investment decisions.
• Attack high-cost workflows: Scale AI now in financial planning, portfolio management, and compliance, automated drafting, AI-generated rationales, knowledge assistants.
• Rebuild the advisor experience around AI: Integrate next-best-action prompts, retention alerts, automated documentation, and personalized outreach into a unified system.
• Encode institutional knowledge into agents: Pair top practitioners with engineers to build and refine AI agents. Embed advisor judgment into today’s agents, without centralized ownership and outcome-based evaluation, differentiation erodes.
• Prepare the tech stack for agents. Introduce a decoupled data layer separating operational systems from data consumption, delivering real-time, API-accessible data while maintaining deterministic control through transaction systems and rules engines.

The UAE ranks first globally in citizen satisfaction with government digital services, with 89% of respondents rating them highly, according to Boston Consulting Group’s (BCG) sixth annual edition of its 2026 Digital Government Citizen Survey Report, which was launched on the first day of AI Everything Abu Dhabi, titled “After a Decade of Digital Gains, AI Is Reshaping Citizens’ Expectations in the GCC[SM1] [GU2] .”   The finding underscores the strength of the UAE’s digital government experience and provides a strong foundation for the next phase of AI-enabled public services.

The survey, conducted across 44 countries, also highlights the depth of the UAE’s digital engagement, with the country ranking first globally in government digital service usage at 53%. More than three-quarters (76%) of UAE respondents say their latest online government transaction delivered a better experience than their typical private-sector interaction, reinforcing the strength of the country’s digital government ecosystem.

This strong digital foundation is increasingly extending into AI adoption, where 82% of UAE respondents reported using AI weekly. High levels of usage are accompanied by relatively positive attitudes toward AI in government, with 53% of UAE respondents believing its benefits outweigh the risks, compared with 49% across the GCC and 36% globally. At the same time, greater exposure to AI is bringing a broader set of considerations into focus for citizens. While GCC citizens remain more optimistic about AI in government than their global peers, overall optimism has declined by 21% since 2024.

This evolution points toward a more hybrid model of service delivery. GCC citizens increasingly favor AI for simpler services while retaining human involvement for more complex interactions, which assures a shift that reflects greater awareness of both the opportunities and considerations associated with AI. At the same time, only around 4% of GCC respondents prefer human-only services with no AI support, compared with almost one in ten globally.

“The UAE’s strong digital government experience reflects years of investment in making public services more accessible, seamless, and responsive to citizens’ needs,” said Rami Mourtada, Partner & Director, Digital Transformation, BCG. “As AI becomes more embedded in public services, governments have an opportunity to build on this foundation with more AI-enabled experiences and process re-engineering to continue focusing on quality and convenience. This next phase will be about deploying AI where it creates clear value, while maintaining human expertise for more complex citizen needs.”

GCC Citizens Embrace the Next Generation of AI-Enabled Services

The BCG report also reveals strong appetite among GCC citizens for the next generation of AI-enabled government services. The region is the most AI-receptive globally, with 79% of citizens open to AI-centered government interactions, compared with 66% globally. Notably, three of the four most strongly supported AI applications in government are agentic use cases, signaling a healthy launchpad for governments to explore services that can move beyond providing information to supporting or completing actions on citizens’ behalf.

This openness is already evident across practical applications: 82% are comfortable with AI providing 24/7 access to information and services; 81% with AI supporting government customer-service agents; 79% with AI detecting fraud and automatically following up; and 78% with AI identifying services citizens qualify for and taking action on their behalf. [SM3] [GU4] Yet citizens are not calling for AI alone. Preference for “AI for simple services, people for complex ones” has risen nine percentage points to 50% over the past two years, reinforcing a hybrid model that combines AI-enabled speed and availability with human judgment for more complex or higher-stakes interactions.

This opportunity builds on a strong track record in digital government service quality. In 2026, the GCC remained the only surveyed region where a majority of citizens rated government digital services above those of the private sector, at 72%. However, private-sector experiences are gaining ground: the net share of GCC respondents rating government services above private-sector services declined from 75% in 2024 to 69% in 2026. The shift creates both a learning opportunity and an impetus for governments to continue innovating as citizen expectations evolve.

As governments move toward more advanced AI-enabled services, citizen AI literacy will be equally important. GCC respondents with expert-level AI proficiency are around four times more likely than those without AI experience to believe that the benefits of AI in government outweigh the risks.  At the same time, greater familiarity with AI is sharpening citizens’ expectations around how it is deployed. Job loss (33%) and accuracy (28%) now rank as the leading concerns, underscoring the importance of pairing AI literacy with safeguards that are visible and relevant to citizens.

“The GCC has a strong opportunity to translate its digital leadership into the next generation of AI-enabled government services,” said Dr. Lars Littig, Managing Director & Senior Partner, BCG. “As citizens become more familiar with AI, building literacy and trust will be critical to sustained adoption. The opportunity is to move forward with AI in ways that reflect how citizens want to engage, expanding automation and agentic capabilities where they create value, while retaining human judgment and embedding responsible safeguards where they matter most.”

Six Priorities for the Next Generation of Digital Government

To build on the region’s digital progress and maximize the potential of AI in government services, BCG’s report outlines six priorities for GCC governments:

1. Rethink core services with AI, redesigning them end to end rather than layering AI onto existing processes.
2. Learn from private-sector innovation as digital experiences improve and citizen expectations evolve.
3. Embed responsible AI through governance, testing, and safeguards that strengthen citizen trust.
4. Build the hybrid model citizens want, using AI for simpler interactions while retaining human expertise for complex or high-stakes needs.
5. Expand agentic AI services beyond information toward services that can support complete journeys and act on citizens’ behalf.
6. Advance AI literacy to build citizen understanding, confidence, and informed adoption.

Together, these priorities can help GCC governments build on a decade of digital progress and translate citizens’ openness to AI into the next generation of public services. By combining strong digital foundations with responsible AI adoption and continued access to human expertise, the region is well positioned to deliver services that are more proactive, personalized, and responsive to citizens’ evolving needs — while sustaining the trust that will be critical to long-term adoption

To access the full BCG Digital Government Citizen Survey2026, visit the link here.