UAE Financial Services Congress
Building Resilient Finance in the Age of Intelligence
The UAE has been the Middle East’s financial epicentre – a hub where global banks, fintech unicorns, and progressive regulators shape the region’s digital finance agenda. In 2026, the sector entered a defining period as new regulatory milestones, including the New Banking Law, Open Finance regulation, and the UAE’s Financial Infrastructure Transformation (FIT) Programme, accelerate industry-wide transformation.
AI, GenAI, and emerging agentic AI are rapidly reshaping how UAE institutions lend, assess risk, manage fraud, advise customers, and run operations. Yet IDC research shows that while 81% of MEA BFSI firms report performance gains from digital and operational transformation, and 100% now use public cloud, only 16% have a fully integrated enterprise-wide AI strategy. Scaling AI responsibly with strong governance, explainability, and data maturity, is becoming a strategic imperative for banking-sector leaders.
At the same time, the UAE’s fintech ecosystem is transforming financial services through digital onboarding, open APIs, embedded finance, payments innovation, and core banking modernization. Initiatives such as the Digital Dirham (CBDC), tokenization pilots, and instant payments are redefining cross-border trade, consumer experience, and national competitiveness. Cyber resilience, Zero Trust architecture, and operational resilience are now central to regulatory expectations.
The UAE Financial Services Congress 2026 brings together technology, risk, data, and business leaders across the financial services ecosystem. Through IDC insights, peer-led discussions, and practical frameworks, attendees will gain actionable strategies for building intelligent, resilient, and future-ready financial institutions in the UAE.
Get Ready to be Inspired: Announcing Our IDC Keynote Speaker
Hear from thought leaders and visionary CIOs speakers redefining technology, leadership, and innovation.
IDC Keynote: The Great Reset: Redefining Financial Services in the UAE
The UAE’s financial sector is undergoing a fundamental reset, driven by new banking law, open finance regulation, and the FIT Programme. Drawing on IDC’s latest MEA BFSI research, this keynote explores the strategic choices facing banks and fintechs as they navigate compliance, reimagine business models, and race to deploy AI and open APIs at scale.
Michael Yeo | Asia/Pacific IDC
Associate Research Director, Financial Insights
Michael Yeo
Michael Yeo is the Associate Research Director for IDC Financial Insights and Retail Insights in the Asia/Pacific region. Mr. Yeo’s core research coverage focuses on payments including the uptake of mobile payments in the Asia/Pacific region, digital banking, and the evolution of joint digital ecosystems involving ecommerce, mcommerce, and payments. Mr. Yeo has also significant experience in advising financial institutions on their fintech management strategies, placing particular emphasis on organizational and technology restructuring within banks to better cope with the demands of current-generation digital customers.
Prior to IDC, Mr. Yeo headed all financial services–related research at KPMG Malaysia. Previously, he served as a project manager at an advisory firm in China, where he advised multiple international clients with their China market entry strategies. Mr. Yeo started his career in an advisory role for financial services at Ernst and Young.
Credentials:
- B.A Accounting and Economics from the University of Reading, United Kingdom
- Frequent speaker in the region on mobile payments and digital ecosystems. Contributor to major global and regional media outlets including CNBC, South China Morning Post, Straits Times, and Global Finance
Event Sessions
One Day Event 4:55 pm
Panel Discussion: Vision to Reality: Building Resilient, AI-Ready Financial Services in the UAE
With key support from the private and public and private sectors, the UAE’s financial landscape is being rapidly rebuilt from the infrastructure up. The Financial Infrastructure Transformation Programme, Open Finance and new regulatory agendas are changing both the terms and the platforms on which banks and fintechs compete. Simultaneously, AI is moving from pilots to production. with agentic AI leading the next wave of digital transformation. Regulators and boards now expect firm evidence of control, not statements of intent. These new requirements have pushed data, cloud, cyber resilience and AI governance, as well as geopolitical risk firmly to board-level issues.
This panel brings together bank, fintech and technology leaders to discuss where ambition is outrunning execution, what verifiable sovereignty and resilience mean in practice, and which choices will separate leaders from followers over the next 24 months.
One Day Event 4:35 pm
IDC Keynote: The Great Reset: Redefining Financial Services in the UAE
The UAE’s financial sector is undergoing a fundamental reset, driven by new banking law, open finance regulation, and the FIT Programme. Drawing on IDC’s latest MEA BFSI research, this keynote explores the strategic choices facing banks and fintechs as they navigate compliance, reimagine business models, and race to deploy AI and open APIs at scale.
Partners
Red Hat | Intel
Red Hat is the world’s leading provider of enterprise open source solutions, using a community-powered approach to deliver high-performing Linux, hybrid cloud, edge, and Kubernetes technologies.
BMC | Magnoos
BMC empowers 86% of the Forbes Global 50 to accelerate business value faster than humanly possible. Our industry-leading portfolios unlock human and machine potential to drive business growth, innovation, and sustainable success. We do this in a simple and optimized way by connecting people, systems, and data that power the world’s largest organizations so they can seize a competitive advantage.
Founded in 2012 and headquartered in Abu Dhabi, Magnoos is a technology implementation partner within MDS SI Group. Together with BMC, Magnoos helps banks and financial institutions across the UAE and KSA orchestrate mission-critical workloads with Control-M, strengthening resilience, compliance and continuity, backed by locally BMC-certified engineers and Arabic-speaking support.
ServiceNow
ServiceNow (NYSE: NOW) is the Super Intelligence Control Tower for business reinvention. The ServiceNow platform integrates with any model, any cloud, and any data source to orchestrate, govern, and secure work across the agentic enterprise. ServiceNow gives customers the enterprise context and control to build and scale confidently. With more than 100 billion workflows running on the platform each year, ServiceNow helps organizations turn fragmented operations into coordinated, autonomous work for IT, CRM, Security, Employee Experience, and more. Learn how ServiceNow puts AI to work for people at www.servicenow.com.
Nutanix
Harness
ManageEngine
ManageEngine is a division of Zoho Corporation and a leading provider of IT management solutions for organizations worldwide. With a powerful, flexible, and AI-powered digital enterprise management platform, we help businesses get their work done from anywhere and everywhere—better, safer, and faster.
Venue
Knowledge Hub
AI Infrastructure: The Foundation of the Agentic Era
The world is entering a defining moment for digital infrastructure. Artificial intelligence has moved from experimentation to ubiquity, and with it, a new operational paradigm is taking shape — one where agents rather than applications become the primary engines of digital value creation. This is the dawn of the agentic AI era, and its success depends on one thing above all else: robust, intelligent, and scalable infrastructure.
Matt Eastwood
| IDC
SVP, WW Research
Read More
Getting Your Data AI Ready
It has become a common refrain – getting data governance right is key to a successful AI strategy! This conventional wisdom is very true, but it is not a new problem. For as long as I have been involved in IT, both as an analyst and as a CIO, companies have struggled with wrangling the various data sets across the applications running at the organization.
Bob Parker
| IDC
SVP, Software and Services Research
Read More
Resilience Runs on What You Can’t See: Why Orchestration Is the Backbone of Trusted Finance
The UAE’s financial sector is being rebuilt in real time. The New Banking Law, Open Finance regulation and the Financial Infrastructure Transformation Programme are, in what IDC describes as the “Great Reset”, redefining how institutions operate, compete and create value. Understandably, boardroom attention has turned to AI, open APIs and new digital platforms.