DIFC passed 2,000 AI, fintech and innovation firms and opened its doors to Japanese startups, the case for careful tokenisation, and the region’s banks showed how far AI has moved from pilot to production. Under it all ran a question about who, or what, the next customer will be.

The Dubai Fintech Summit closed its second day at Madinat Jumeirah on Tuesday with DIFC marking a milestone it set itself less than ten years ago. The centre is now home to more than 2,000 AI, fintech and innovation firms, His Excellency Arif Amiri, chief executive of DIFC Authority, told the opening plenary, up from the 11 startups that joined its first accelerator in 2017.

From 11 startups to 2,000 firms

Amiri said the number that matters is not how many firms arrive but how many grow from Dubai into global leaders. He used the stage to set out two new pieces. A partnership will give up to 6,000 Japanese startups direct access to the DIFC ecosystem, part of a wider push into emerging markets and new corridors with the Global South. DIFC will also launch a Dubai Fintech Stack, a set of tools to help founders with onboarding, payments, risk, security and AI. Neither the Japanese partner nor a launch date was named.

The day’s big numbers came from Digital Economy 2.0, a report DIFC published with Asia House. Michael Lawrence, Asia House’s chief executive, told the summit that the digital economy is moving on from digitising processes to systems that act for themselves. The report puts global technology spending at USD 5.6trn this year and expects AI to add USD 22.3trn to the world economy by 2030, while the fintech market grows from around USD 400bn today to USD 1.5trn. Lawrence set Dubai beside Singapore and Switzerland’s Zug and Zurich as the hubs to watch, and urged businesses to move post-quantum cryptography up their agenda, with cybercrime already costing the world about USD 10trn a year. The next report in the series, on the strategic business hubs of tomorrow, is due on 25 November.

Tokenisation as evolution, not revolution

Noel Quinn, chair of Julius Baer and former group chief executive of HSBC, gave the summit’s signature session, a nod to Julius Baer having been the first financial firm to set up in DIFC, in 2004. He called tokenisation a natural evolution rather than a revolution, and asked the room to separate the blockchain from the products built on it. The bigger prize, he argued, is opening assets such as bonds, gold and trade finance to investors who could not reach them before, with a full audit trail behind every slice.

He was just as clear about the limits. Enthusiasm for the technology is no substitute for due diligence, and a crypto hack earlier this week was not a failure of the chain itself. “It wasn’t the blockchain that got hacked. It was the entry point to the blockchain that got hacked in a very old-fashioned way,” he said.

On AI, Quinn recalled how HSBC used it to cut complex multi-currency pricing from hours to minutes while leaving the final call with the trader, and said AI will become part of every bank’s technology stack, not least to screen payments for money laundering and sanctions.

He was followed by Dr Fatih Karahan, Governor of the Central Bank of the Republic of Türkiye, who set out how far Turkey has come: reserves rebuilt, USD 140bn of FX-protected deposit liabilities run down to zero, and inflation down from a peak of 75 per cent to just under 30 per cent. He made the case for payment sovereignty, pointing to the central bank’s own settlement and instant payment systems, and said Turkey is joining SEPA and SWIFT’s new instant payments scheme.

Banks move AI into production

Away from the plenary, the region’s banks talked less about whether to use AI and more about how much of the bank it can now run. Miguel Rio-Tinto, who leads digital and technology at Emirates NBD, told The Fintech Times the bank has more than 150 AI initiatives under way, 65 of them already in production. Customers who call the bank are answered by an AI agent, and an agent inside the ENBD X app will soon replace its menus. The bank builds and orchestrates its customer journeys itself, with some 2,500 software engineers, but partners for frontier models and for the computing power to run them.

Cyber security is where he sees the sharpest change. As frontier models get better at finding software flaws, the number of critical vulnerabilities the bank has to assess has risen from about 1,000 a month at the start of 2025 to around 15,000 in October, he said. Emirates NBD is answering with the same tools, using a frontier model from its recently announced OpenAI partnership to probe its own systems. For Rio-Tinto, the choice echoes the bank’s earlier digital drive. “Our CEO was constantly hammering us, digitise or die. The same thing is happening now. It’s AI or die,” he said. [VIDEO: Miguel Rio-Tinto, Emirates NBD]

Commercial Bank of Dubai, the summit’s strategic banking partner, used the week to sign a run of agreements: with Microsoft on AI use cases, Silent Eight on AI name screening, Comarch on its digital wealth platform, Zamp on intelligent automation, and Harvey, Sirion and Flank on legal technology. Thomas Cherian, the bank’s chief technology and services officer, said its Merlin platform, which drafts credit proposals in minutes, is now used by 85 per cent of relationship managers in wholesale banking. He believes 55 to 60 per cent of operations work could be handed to AI agents, with a person still approving the outcome, and the bank wants to own the agents it builds and the IP behind them. His warning was about where to start. “If you try to automate what you have today, I don’t think you will get anything out of it,” he said. [VIDEO: Thomas Cherian, Commercial Bank of Dubai]

Rails for agents, and for corridors

For Zand Bank, the next customer may not be human at all. Chief executive Michael Chan said the bank set up its blockchain and AI teams 30 months ago to prepare for agentic commerce, in which AI agents pay each other on chain using stablecoins, custody and tokenised assets. On-chain volumes are climbing fast, with one recent single transaction worth USD 100m, and he expects agentic commerce to arrive within 12 months. He sees demand well beyond business payments, pointing to people in Africa hit by currency devaluation who need faster access to dollars. The obstacle, in his view, is not technical. “Technology is never the problem. I think it’s the synchronisation, alignment between the different jurisdictions that is the biggest problem we have to solve,” he said. [VIDEO: Michael Chan, Zand Bank]

MultiBank Group founder and chairman Naser Taher brought the corridor theme from the east. After two decades in China, he moved the group’s interbank trading platform project from Hong Kong to the UAE, where it now has government backing and is aimed at BRICS and emerging markets, with settlement offered in stablecoins including USDU, a UAE-based dollar stablecoin. He expects traditional finance, digital assets and AI to fold into a single super app within a year or two. “They have to merge. 100 per cent, they have to merge,” he said. [VIDEO: Naser Taher, MultiBank Group]

Beyond the summit

Tuesday also widened the week beyond fintech. At the Future Sustainability Forum, DIFC said partners in its 1 Million Learners programme have reached more than 130,000 people this year, and that it is building a Total Impact Framework with a certified B Corp consultancy to measure outcomes. Space for Earth Labs, its geospatial accelerator with the Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Centre and RELM Insurance, drew 73 applications from 24 countries. IPEM Future made its Dubai debut, InsureTek opened its two-day run.

Dubai Future Finance Week continues on Wednesday with the Future Islamic Finance Forum at Madinat Jumeirah.

The post Dubai Fintech Summit day two: 2,000 firms, a Japanese bridge and AI moves into production appeared first on The Fintech Times.