Corporate and infrastructure finance companies in the GCC countries are likely to operate conservative strategies through 2021 as the economy recovers slowly from the Covid-19 pandemic and oil shock, said S&P Global Ratings in a new report.
The Central Bank of Bahrain (“CBB”) launched the Bahrain Open Banking Framework (Bahrain OBF) to ensure holistic implementation of Open Banking services by the industry. This framework includes detailed operational guidelines, security standards and guidelines, customer experience guidelines, technical open Application Programming Interface (API) specifications and the overall governance framework needed to protect customer data. These standards follow the comprehensive rules on Open Banking which were previously issued in December 2018.
David Parker, co-chief investment officer at the Bahrain Economic Development Board (an organization responsible for attracting inward investment into the Kingdom for key areas such as technology development and supporting the local financial and banking industry), recently confirmed that the country aims to position itself as the “startup capital” of the world.
The Central Bank of the United Arab Emirates (‘UAE’) announced, on 29 January 2020, that the UAE Financial Intelligence Unit (‘FIU’) had signed a Memorandum of Understanding (‘MoU’) on anti-money laundering and countering the financing of terrorism (‘AML/CFT’) with the Financial Investigation Department in the Kingdom of Bahrain and the Financial Information Center for the Republic of Namibia.
World trade will continue to face strong headwinds in 2019 and 2020 after growing more slowly than expected in 2018 due to rising trade tensions and increased economic uncertainty, said the World Trade Organisation (WTO).
FinTech will radically improve the financial health of the people of the Gulf through access to next-generation banking services, says Simon Galpin, managing director of Bahrain Economic Development Board.
He was speaking at Finnovex ME 2019, a one-day conference on financial innovation and excellence, held in Dubai.
Cyber risk management should go beyond IT-specific concerns like malware, firewalls, and virus scans.
“What are we doing to protect ourselves from cyberattacks?”
It’s a question every CFO eventually asks their team.
Although the question suggests IT-specific concerns like malware, firewalls, and virus scans, CFOs need to pause and broaden their perspective, examine cyber-related business risk in the areas of physical security and in industrial controls as well.
A new study from Juniper Research has identified a range of strategies for payment providers to deploy if they are to maximise their opportunities across both the offline and online space.
The research found that retail spend is expected to increase by $6 trillion globally between 2018 and 2023 (taking total spend to $30 trillion), with growth driven by a combination of alternative payment mechanisms (most notably wallets) and online spend.
Blockchain has the potential to develop new renewable energy markets and play a game-changing role in helping the GCC energy sector transition to a more secure, resilient, cost-effective, and low-carbon grid, according to Booz Allen Hamilton, a global management and IT consulting firm.
Bahrain is the next country in the Middle East that appears set to adopt cryptocurrency. Top government officials say the nation wants to become a hub for Bitcoin and other iterations emerging technology in the region. Thus, there are plans to institute a trial operational framework for cryptocurrency companies in Bahrain while regulators attempt to draft robust regulations for the emerging asset class.
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