On November 19, 2026, key leaders from the financial services community of the UAE will convene at the UAE financial service congress. At this year’s event. conversations amongst the guests will be focused not on whether to enact a digital transformation program but on key operational and strategic issues of who controls the new hybrid infrastructure, how fast AI can be scaled safely, and how to stay ahead of increasingly synthetic fraud threats. IDC data points to five trends that define the market in the Middle east market.

1. Bank technology budgets are growing faster than most regions – Growth is in platforms

IDC’s Banking IT Spending Guide has banked in the Middle East and Africa spending $17.2 billion on IT in 2025, rising to $30.3 billion by 2030, a 12.0% compound annual growth rate in US dollars. This growth outpaces Asia/Pacific excluding Japan (10.4%) and Western Europe (10.8%), coming in second globally just behind the US market. This impressive growth highlights the exciting pushes for further transformation and innovation which are mounting in the region.

Key to the spending in the MEA region is where that spend is going to: Spending on software grows at 18.8% a year, lifting its share of bank IT spend from 25% to 34%, while IT services grow at only 6.3%. Internal IT spend rises from $4.9 billion to $8.1 billion.  Banks in the MEA are buying platforms and building in-house capability rather than outsourcing delivery to vendors.

2. The state is building the financial rails

The Central Bank of the UAE’s Financial Infrastructure Transformation Program is rolling out instant payments, domestic card schemes, open finance platforms, e-KYC and a financial services cloud. Alongside it, the Sovereign Financial Cloud Initiative aims to deliver an AI-enabled sovereign platform to secure digital financial services and improve resilience. The National Financial Inclusion Strategy 2026–2030 adds a universal-accounts objective. The central bank is also working to attract 260 fintech firms, which is lifting demand for digital finance platforms, cloud migration, and integration work .

For banks, this clear regulatory direction can be a clear direction for strategic planning. It  shifts competitive advantage from owning plumbing into building differentiated services on top of shared, regulator-sponsored infrastructure and that is where we expect new waves of innovation to be focused on.

3. AI is a strategic priority – Scaling it however, meets real barriers

IDC rates the UAE financial industry as high on both industry maturity and regulatory complexity, with live use cases in real-time fraud detection, automated KYC and anti-money laundering, credit scoring, SME lending and GenAI customer support all documented to be live from our global research.  Across UAE and cross-industry, 43% of organizations do not yet see themselves ready to take full advantage of AI.  Fragmented data, talent shortages and difficulty industrializing pilots remain the key constraints to true enterprise-wide scaling of AI. Without direct addressing of these barriers, financial services institutions will find it much more difficult to measure and justify new investments in AI initiatives and find themselves unable to derive the true value of AI which is largely available at much larger scales.

Our surveys in the region also support these statements: Among banking, financial services and insurance firms in the wider region, AIOps (52%) and GenAI infrastructure (48%) are rising investment priorities, yet 39% cite data privacy and regulatory concerns and 35% cite skills gaps as barriers to adopting emerging technology. Early GenAI wins are real, but turning isolated ROI into enterprise-wide value requires engineering foundations, governance and life-cycle management that many institutions lack.

4. Fraud has overtaken ransomware as the top threat

Fraud is now the number one threat in the Middle East, Türkiye and Africa and ahead of ransomware, according to IDC data. Regional banks in MEA reported a triple-digit increase in GenAI-enabled fraud attempts in 2025, and banking saw a 140% rise in deep-fake-driven fraud. IDC estimates that in order to counter this, 40% of large enterprises in the region will hold a dedicated budget for GenAI fraud defense in 2026.

Identity and securing identity are the pivot points. Spending on identity security and security analytics is forecast to grow fastest at 20%, and national digital IDs such as UAE PASS are becoming integration targets for identity threat detection and response. Regulators in the region are also tightening real-time transaction monitoring, KYC and AML expectations, pushing banks from point tools toward integrated RegTech platforms. This again echoes earlier mentions of investment in platforms being key to shaping the future investment patterns of the MEA region.

5. Sovereignty and regulation shape every architecture decision going forward

The global macro-trend of Data residency, cybersecurity assurance and AI governance are reflected as clearly in the MEA region as in any other region globally. They have become operational design considerations rather than legal afterthoughts, and the UAE’s multi-authority regulatory structure means suppliers must plan for federal and emirate-level requirements. A new Federal Authority for AI and Data, established in June 2026, consolidates oversight, and hyperscaler commitments such as Microsoft’s $15.2 billion in UAE infrastructure through 2029 are building the in-country capacity that makes sovereign deployment practical and feasible.

Geopolitical risk adds a resilience dimension. IDC’s base case based on extensive modelling and data is that a contained Middle East conflict causes minimal disruption to core AI investment, though a prolonged one would raise energy and hardware costs and slow discretionary projects. In a worldwide survey fielded in April and May 2026, 47.6% of organizations were increasing cybersecurity funding and nearly 44% were still increasing AI funding, while consulting and systems integration budgets were being held flat or cut. What is clear is that multi-region redundancy as well as the theme of strategic resiliency is now a board-level topic across the financial institutions of the MEA region.

What it means

Banks: treat sovereign infrastructure as a given. Compete on data quality, fraud intelligence and AI operations. Technology providers: sell outcomes, not platforms. Bundle data modernization, governance and security into one transformation story, and localize for UAE residency and regulation. Fintechs: the central bank’s open finance and instant payment rails open the largest new addressable surface in years.

What to watch

Three signals matter. Will instant payments and open finance reach production fast? Will AI pilots become governed enterprise deployments? Will the shift to software and in-house build push services providers toward managed outcomes? To gain more insight on these pressing issues and key inputs into how these questions should be answered, please do join us on November 19 at the UAE financial service congress.