Insights
Perspectives from the practitioners.
6 whitepapers and 10 articles on the questions GCC financial services leaders are asking now: execution, automation, regulation, cost and growth. Written by people who have done the work.
Whitepapers
Points of view, in depth.
Short papers with an argument, the evidence, a framework and four moves for Monday. Free to download.
Articles
Shorter reads from the practice.
Five to eight minutes each. Every one ends with what to do on Monday.
Why strategy dies in the gap between the Board and the front line
GCC banks do not lack ambition. They lack a delivery engine that survives the second quarter. Here is what separates the programmes that land from the ones that quietly stall.
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Digitising the mess: why Lean has to come before automation
Automation applied to a broken process gives you a faster broken process. The banks getting real returns from AI and RPA are doing something unglamorous first.
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IFRS S1 and S2 are here. Most GCC sustainability data is not ready.
Sustainability reporting has moved from the communications team to the audit committee. The institutions that treat it as a data and control problem will be the ones that sleep at night.
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Day one is not the finish line: lessons from GCC bank integrations
The region has seen a wave of consolidation. The integrations that created value shared a small number of habits, and they were all in place long before legal day.
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Saudization as strategy: building national capability that competes
Nationalisation targets are treated as compliance in too many institutions. The leaders are using them to build a workforce advantage their competitors cannot buy.
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Agentic AI in bank operations: where the value actually lands
Beyond the demos, a small number of use cases are delivering hard returns in regional banks. They share three characteristics, and none of them is the sophistication of the model.
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Cost-to-income: the five levers that actually move the ratio
Regional banks announce cost programmes with a percentage target and a deadline. The ones that hit it work lever by lever, with an owner and a baseline for each.
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Open finance in the Gulf: compliance obligation or distribution strategy?
SAMA's open banking framework and the CBUAE's open finance regulation give incumbents a choice. Most are choosing compliance. A few are choosing advantage.
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Operational resilience and third-party risk: the questionnaire is not a control
As GCC regulators sharpen their expectations on resilience and outsourcing, the annual vendor questionnaire looks increasingly like a ritual. What good looks like is more demanding and more useful.
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Pricing is the fastest revenue lever most GCC banks never pull deliberately
Fee structures set years ago, rate cards that follow the competitor and bundles nobody has costed. A disciplined pricing study routinely finds revenue that costs nothing to deliver.
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