DIFC passed 600 wealth and asset management firms and named Mizuho as its partner for Japanese startups. At the Future Islamic Finance Forum, the industry’s own leaders gave a frank verdict: there is no shortage of capital or goodwill, but markets, institutions and fintechs are still too poorly connected.

On Wednesday, Dubai Future Finance Week moved its focus from fintech to wealth, fixed income, insurance and Islamic finance. DIFC began the day with another milestone. The centre is now home to more than 600 wealth and asset management firms, well ahead of any other centre in the region by its own count, as family offices and institutional investors set up regional headquarters in Dubai. The DealCatalyst Fixed Income Alternatives programme brought European and US asset managers and structured credit investors together with regional banks and sovereign funds to discuss private credit, structured finance and new funding models.

A name for the Japanese bridge

The Japanese partnership that Arif Amiri, chief executive of DIFC Authority, trailed on stage on Tuesday now has a name. DIFC has signed a strategic partnership with Mizuho Financial Group that will give up to 6,000 of the bank’s startup clients access to the DIFC Innovation Hub and Ignyte, its digital innovation platform, with market entry and soft landing support across the Middle East, Africa and South Asia. Amiri signed for DIFC and Suneel Bakhshi, deputy group CEO, signed for Mizuho, with DIFC Governor Essa Kazim as witness.

The deal builds on a 20-year relationship. DIFC hosts the UAE’s only cluster of Japanese financial firms, 19 companies employing 560 people, including Mizuho, SMBC, MUFG, Nomura and the Japan Bank for International Cooperation. Mizuho says it has provided around JPY 1trn in financing to Japanese startups over the past three years and has more than 400 specialists supporting them. The partnership will focus on AI upskilling, Fintech, digital transformation and cross-border links.

Islamic finance at 50

More than 1,000 people from over 50 countries came to the Future Islamic Finance Forum at Madinat Jumeirah, and DIFC used it to launch three initiatives. DIFC Academy is opening learning pathways through its Centre for Global Islamic Finance, aiming for more than 3,000 learners by 2031. The Islamic Finance Innovation Challenge by Ignyte will pair Islamic banks with technology ventures to pilot production-ready tools for financing, sukuk structuring, compliance and takaful. And the DIFC Innovation Hub will set up an Islamic Finance Innovation Centre with CRDB Bank, Emirates Islamic, Principle Investor Group and Standard Chartered Saadiq. The centre will bring banks, regulators, Shariah scholars, standards bodies and technology firms together to work on shared problems, with a focus on the Global South. DIFC puts the Islamic finance industry at USD 9.31trn by 2030 and Islamic fintech at close to USD 180bn this year.

The leadership panel opened with a reminder of how far the industry has come. Mustafa Adil, head of Islamic finance at LSEG, noted that modern Islamic finance is about 50 years old and began in Dubai. It now holds more than USD 6trn in assets across over 2,200 institutions in more than 80 countries, and 56 countries have Islamic finance rules of some kind. It is also concentrated in a few markets that still work largely in silos.

Khurram Hilal, group chief executive of Standard Chartered Saadiq, argued that the next phase depends on connection: between banking, asset management and philanthropy within the industry, and between regions outside it. He said the industry has looked west for too long and should become a bridge across the Global South, especially between East Asia and the Gulf. “There’s a lot more conversations that need to take place between the East and West of Asia,” he said. He described a Middle East roadshow in Beijing this year where the central bank, the sovereign wealth fund and corporates were all keen to explore Islamic finance, and said the industry needs to reach out more.

Sukuk: big, but bunched up

Hilal was blunt about sukuk. The market passed USD 1trn, he said, but around 80 per cent of it sits in the GCC and Malaysia. Sovereigns and financial institutions account for roughly 95 per cent of issuers, and less than 6 per cent of the capital raised reaches Africa or South Asia, where infrastructure needs are greatest. Because supply is short, holders keep their paper and the secondary market stays thin. He pointed to growing Shariah-compliant repo volumes and an IIFM project to standardise repo documents as ways to free up trapped liquidity. He also said this year’s regional conflict showed the need for proper hedging tools for institutions concentrated in one market.

Charles Haresnape, chief executive of Gatehouse Bank, spoke about the UK and Europe, where 45 million Muslims in Europe and 6 million in the UK remain underserved. Gatehouse campaigned successfully for equal tax treatment for some Islamic products, but the UK did not renew its sovereign sukuk this year, so the bank has to buy overseas paper for its liquidity buffers. “There isn’t one, which is crazy,” he said. He also said about half of Gatehouse’s customers are not Muslim, younger customers see Islamic and sustainable finance as much the same thing, and the portfolios it sells are bought mainly by conventional investors.

Professor Talal Yassine, managing director of Australia’s Salaam, which manages a Shariah-compliant pension fund of around AUD 750m, described the opposite lesson on marketing. Pitching to ethical and Islamic investors at once, he said, ended up selling to nobody. Speaking in Islamic terms has gone down better with regulators and customers. He also said the industry’s money is out of step with the wider halal economy. Nurym Ayazbayev, executive director for Islamic finance at the Eurasian Development Bank, said the UAE provided USD 15.5bn of the USD 22.8bn in direct investment into Central Asia by mid 2025. The region now has four full Islamic banks and more than ten Islamic windows, and the bank has opened an office in Abu Dhabi to be closer to Gulf capital.

Fintech’s graduation problem

A second panel looked at why Islamic fintech struggles to scale. Mohammad Kamran Wajid, deputy chief executive of Emirates Islamic, said banks, regulators, investors and fintechs pursue different goals in separate silos. Even an Islamic window and an Islamic bank in the same group can have separate Shariah boards, he said. His bank’s e-KYC pilot with a fintech stalled over compliance and fraud, and he suggested banks share platforms instead of each reinventing the wheel.

Iqbal Khan, chief executive of Fajr Capital, said capital is not the constraint but scale is. Very few fintechs get past about USD 20m in revenue. Under bank capital rules, venture stakes carry risk weights that keep Islamic banks out, and exit routes are limited. He called for a mezzanine fund to carry companies from startup to maturity, and for banks to separate payments from lending. For his firm, Shariah has to be central to a business. “Sharia is not seen as a bolt-on. Sharia is authentic,” he said.

For the regulator, Eisa Al Amri, associate director for macro-prudential supervision at the DFSA, said rules become a burden when they are unclear, and uncertainty is expensive. “We don’t regulate the technology per se, but what we do is we look at the activity and the risks associated with that activity,” he said. He pointed to the DFSA’s Innovation Testing Licence for startups and to a bank that had never held a digital custody permission anywhere and got one in DIFC after early engagement. On Shariah, he said the DFSA checks that a firm has the right governance in place, while rulings remain a matter for the firm’s own board.

Dr Mughees Shaukat, managing director of Panacea Consulting, put it more sharply. He argued that forcing agile fintechs into bureaucratic banks is the wrong model, and that asset managers, capital markets and venture investors should do more of the lifting. Shariah standards can take two to three years to produce, far too slow for technology, so he proposed a dedicated body to set fast-track standards for digital finance and fintech. He said Oman is building its own international financial centre, modelled on Astana’s AIFC.

Dubai Future Finance Week continues on Thursday with the Future Tokenisation Forum at Jumeirah Mina Al Salam, where regulators including the DFSA and VARA take the stage, alongside the Dubai Family Wealth Summit and the Investment Leaders Exchange.

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