A year ago, we wrote about the momentum building in the UAE: the regulatory frameworks taking shape, the crypto native firms setting up in Dubai, the banks starting to pay attention. That piece was about potential. The Financial Grid, our 2026 survey of more than 600 banking and corporate decision makers, gives us the first real measure of what institutions in this region have actually done with it. The standout finding is that the region is moving decisively from potential to production.
Production, Not Promise
Globally, the Financial Grid found a gap between ambition and delivery: 88% of financial institutions rate 24/7 settlement a high or core strategic priority, but only 16% are actually in production. That gap is the defining tension of this year’s data.
In the Middle East, the same gap exists, but the starting point is different. 28.3% of institutions here are already in production, the highest of any region we surveyed and close to double the global figure. 95.7% have either budgeted or committed funding for 2026, the tightest commitment of anywhere in our study.
The shape of that activity has changed too. Eighteen months ago, most of what we saw here were pilots run to understand the technology. What we’re seeing now are commercialized pilots, projects with a revenue case attached from the start, built to scale into production rather than sit in a lab. We are seeing that shift directly in our own pipeline: banks that used to ask whether to move at all are now asking how fast, and you can see it in the volume of RFPs coming out of the region. That’s a different institution making that decision, and it shows up in the numbers.
Competition Is the First Driver
Non-banks are rated a critical competitive pressure by 65.2% of institutions here, the highest of any region against 43% globally. What pushes that number so far above the global figure is that it isn’t one competitor. Banks in this region are losing four distinct customer segments to four different categories of non-bank player, each built around something a licensed bank has not historically been structured to serve.
Retail traders and investors moved to the exchanges. VARA-licensed venues with local teams and local operations, including OKX, Binance, Bybit and Kraken alongside regional players like BitOasis and Rain, now hold balances that previously sat in deposit accounts. Remittance senders moved to stablecoin corridors, and that is the segment with the most at stake: the UAE is the world’s second-largest source of outbound remittances after the US, around AED 183 billion in 2024, and Careem Pay, Fasset and Rain now route part of that flow over stablecoin rails instead of correspondent banking. Small-ticket property investors moved to tokenization platforms. Early private banking clients moved to sovereign-backed venues like MidChains and M2.
What separates this region is the response. Several UAE banks have already built the capability back in rather than concede the segment. Liv (part of Emirates NBD), Wio Bank, RAKBANK and Raya now offer digital asset access to their own customers through licensed digital-asset service providers. Zand integrated RippleNet and then Circle’s USDC to hold its position in the remittance corridor. On issuance, the Central Bank has given banks an instrument of their own: AE Coin from Mbank went live in 2024, Zand AED followed in November 2025, the FAB, ADQ and IHC consortium’s DDSC is now live, and RAKBANK holds in-principle approval for a dirham token.
That gap explains a lot of the urgency behind the uptick in RFP volume. Banks here aren’t building because a survey told them the category matters. They’re building because they can see who else is already circling the same customers, and the pressure is registering as measurably higher here than anywhere else in the world. In our own conversations, the trigger is rarely a strategy paper. It is a retail or commercial bank watching deposit outflows to a licensed exchange show up in its own numbers, and deciding it would rather serve that customer than watch the balance leave.
Regulation Is the Second Major Driver for the Region
Globally, 96% of financial institutions describe the regulatory outlook as favorable. In the Middle East, that figure is 100%, with 39% calling it very favorable, the highest of any region. Regulatory uncertainty is cited as a constraint by only 26% here, the lowest anywhere, against 70% in the US.
Regulatory clarity arrived here earlier than in most jurisdictions globally, and the lead time shows up directly in launch speed: institutions in this region are moving from decision to live capability faster than the density of banks we see doing the same thing elsewhere. Clarity isn’t background context. It’s the mechanism.
The UAE’s framework gives institutions clear answers to the three questions every legal and risk committee asks before signing off: who is the regulator, what license applies, and what happens if something goes wrong. The Central Bank’s federal framework covers issuance, custody, transfer and conversion. The Securities and Commodities Authority sits alongside it for security tokens. VARA licenses the broader virtual asset ecosystem in Dubai. DIFC and ADGM give institutions common law jurisdictions that global counterparts already recognize.
The framework is not finished, and that is the point. Regulators here are actively hardening it. VARA’s June guidance moved AML risk assessment from an annual exercise to a quarterly board obligation for all licensed VASPs, with explicit FATF blacklist integration and immediate updates required on any structural or product change. Read that correctly and it isn’t friction. It’s a regulator preparing for the UAE’s FATF review by tightening its own rigor, which is exactly what a jurisdiction does when it expects to still be relevant in five years, not one that’s trying to slow things down. Favorable and rigorous aren’t in tension here. They’re the same signal.
The Contest Has Moved Inside the Building
If competition and regulatory clarity have done their work, the constraint has shifted somewhere else: inside the institution. Globally, operating model readiness blocks progress for 41% of institutions, core system integration for 52%. In the Middle East, internal governance is cited as a blocking obstacle by 61%, the highest of any region, and competing internal priorities by 57%, more than double every other market we surveyed.
C-suite ownership is also the highest anywhere: 73.9% of institutions here report executive leadership actively driving digital asset projects, against 56% globally. That’s not a contradiction of the governance numbers. It’s the same story from two angles. When this many senior leaders want to own a project, sequencing and control become the fight.
Leadership engagement is one signal. A sharper one is whether the digital asset business has actually moved into a P&L line, corporate banking, transaction banking, asset management, rather than sitting in an innovation team that reports around the business rather than through it. That’s the difference between a project that gets funded once and one that gets funded every year. Institutions here have largely concluded that the infrastructure and the strategy have to come before the revenue case, not the other way round, and that conclusion is what’s driving the sequencing fight in the first place.
The Wallet Layer Is the Test
This is where infrastructure choices stop being abstract. Globally, secure institutional custody and wallet governance is rated a critical factor in provider selection by 61% of financial institutions. In the Middle East, it’s 83%, the highest of any region we measured, ahead of Latin America at 75%, Europe at 67%, and the US at 60%. It’s also the single hardest part of building a wallet stack for institutions here, cited more often than compliance or round the clock operational readiness.
The test for whether infrastructure is commercially usable, rather than still experimental, comes down to a short list: compliance built in, operational resilience that holds up under a bank’s SLAs, and secure key management that doesn’t depend on manual reconciliation across multiple vendors. Key management is the piece institutions here are least willing to compromise on once they’re moving real money.
Singapore Gulf Bank, licensed by the Central Bank of Bahrain, chose its key management model before its use cases, then built treasury operations and custody on top of it. That sequencing costs more upfront, and it is a large part of why this region got furthest into production.
Where This Leaves Institutions Here
The Middle East isn’t waiting for regulatory clarity or executive buy in. Both arrived. What’s left is the harder, less visible work: internal governance, sequencing, and choosing infrastructure that can hold up once a pilot becomes a production system moving real balances every day.
That’s the decision Fireblocks works through with institutions across the region every day, not which use case to launch first, but which platform can carry every use case that follows it without a rebuild. We work with over 100 banks around the globe, and the ones that get this right treat the first use case as an entry point into a platform that serves their digital asset strategy as it scales.
Read the flagship Financial Grid report for more insights and global data from Fireblocks’ 2026 survey.
