Welcome to ADGM

Good morning everyone. I hope you can hear me. Welcome to uh day two of Abu Dhabi Finance Week. It's an important day today because it's about asset management. So today is asset Abu Dhabi.

We're really talking about how asset management today is helping engineer the capital network of tomorrow. We're living in a changing world. We always live in changing environments and things like finance adapt very quickly to that changing environment. For example, we have a lot of geopolitical change at the moment. We have a lot of technological innovation and change happening at the same time.

From a finance perspective, that change is really being driven by tokenization, the DT foundation, thank you, by blockchain. And in particular the result is the creation of digital assets, digital financial instruments and importantly also the evolution, the continuing evolution and the rapid evolution of artificial intelligence. ADGM and Abu Dhabi are ready and are helping define the new future in those new tech technological innovations and how they work with financial services. If you look at where we are today, I was reflecting the other day because we only just celebrated our 10th anniversary as a international financial center. We established ADGM.

We established it with some key concepts in in the vision. One of them was to build an international financial center not only for today but for tomorrow for the future but also importantly one that was built on the direct application of English common law which really was the basis of our legal system and thirdly because of today and it's being asset management focused asset management was always going to be one of the core pillars of ADGM success And after 10 years, that's truly come to fruition. If I look at some of the things that have occurred recently uh in terms of the success that we've had, assets under management, 48% increase year onear, 43% increase in licensed entities. We've had over 160 asset managers and fund managers establish themselves in ADGM in the past 10 years. We have over 220 funds being doiciled funds being managed from ADGM and other assets elsewhere.

If you look at some of the other key features and statistics which you probably already are aware of, it's quite amazing where we've come from to today. I mean, there were a lot of naysayers back in the early days when I first arrived here over 11 years ago. Can Abu Dhabi create an international financial center to rival some of the greatest financial centers in the world? Well, we've come a long way since then. A lot of those naysayers have fallen away.

And on the trajectory that we planted and we're moving forward on, we are going to achieve those goals very, very quickly. As the CEO of the Financial Services Regulatory Authority, my team and I truly believe in innovation and being progressive in our approach. We believe in engaging with you the industry because we learn from you. We understand you. Then we can create regulatory frameworks that are designed to help finance develop and grow.

But ultimately we are also a riskbased regulator. So we have to make sure that those risks that do develop in the financial system are contained and mitigated appropriately. We're here to build trust and integrity because trust and integrity are very important in ADGM and Abu Dhabi. Looking ahead, we've done a lot of work on enhancing our regulatory framework over the last 10 years and that hasn't changed in 2025. We've done a lot of work this year and we will continue to do a lot of work going forward.

Just some examples. This year we came out with a cyber crime um framework because cyber crime is a key risk that we are very cognizant of. We've come out with a consultation paper recently because we're enhancing our fund framework. We're developing a framework for small hedge for small uh fund managers as well as institutional investor fund managers. So we're looking at how we can develop our framework in a way that it the industry can grow in a safe and transparent fashion.

I'll conclude here today. I look forward to seeing you all as the rest of the week progresses. I'd like to invite you all to engage with us and participate in engineering the new capital framework because that's where we're going in the future. Thank you very much.

[music]