Our managing partner moderated a panel at the Dubai FinTech Summit 2026

On 3 November 2026, at the Dubai FinTech Summit 2026, organised by the Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC) as part of Dubai Future Finance Week, our managing partner, Jochen Biedermann, moderated the panel "How Technology Is Rewriting the Impact of Financial Centers".

The panel brought together three very different financial centers, so that the same questions would produce genuinely different answers:

• Alya AlZarouni, Chief Operating Officer, Dubai International Financial Centre Authority — a leading international gateway with more than 10,000 active companies, over 1,930 of them in AI, FinTech and innovation
• An Kelles, Director GCC, Jersey Finance — a specialised international financial center with depth in funds and private wealth, serving markets far larger than its host economy
• Armand Muganga, Business Development Manager, Kigali International Financial Centre — an emerging financial center building its institutional foundations and a predominantly regional investor base

The starting point was a white paper of the World Alliance of International Financial Centers published in September 2026, The Impact of Financial Centers. Across the Alliance, member centers support more than 4.2 million jobs, generate over USD 750 billion in value added, and account for 7–12% of national fiscal receipts in their host economies. Yet the paper's central argument is that headcount and institution counts say less and less about what a financial center is worth to its economy. What matters is the capital, the innovation and talent, the rules, and the standing it gives its host country.

Technology is moving all four. The panel discussed:

• AI — what an AI-native financial center looks like, whether automating routine work creates new, high-quality jobs, and whether AI is a chance for an emerging center like Kigali to leapfrog or a threat, given what AI infrastructure costs to own and control.
• Tokenization — which functions in payments, settlement, custody and fund servicing risk leaving a center, and which new ones it is positioned to capture.
• Digital assets — where each center has drawn its regulatory line, and whether that has brought activity in.
• Measurement — when a single transaction is split across several jurisdictions, each performing a different function, how a center knows which share of the value it kept, and what that means for how its impact should be measured.

Roundtable: digital assets in banking

The day before, on 2 November, Jochen also spoke at the closed-door Mashreq x DIFC Innovation Hub Roundtable, "Digital Assets in Banking: From Experimentation to Institutional Adoption." Moderated by Amith Rajan, EVP and Head of Wholesale Digital Banking at Mashreq and CEO of NeoVentures, the roundtable brought together senior leaders from across the financial ecosystem to exchange perspectives on institutional digital-asset adoption, emerging opportunities, regulatory developments, and the future of digital assets across the GCC.

For more on the UAE's FinTech landscape, explore our UAE FinTech directory and UAE FinTech statistics; our Rwanda directory covers the FinTechs around the Kigali International Financial Centre.

We thank DIFC for an excellent Dubai FinTech Summit, and Mashreq and the DIFC Innovation Hub for hosting the roundtable.

All pictures courtesy of DIFC.