Six compliance pain points we heard at Dubai FinTech Summit, and how firms are solving them
Regulatory obligations arrive faster than a firm can staff them. Compliance rarely fails in one dramatic moment. It slips in the gaps between providers and spreadsheets, and it shows up when a regulator or a bank partner asks who reviewed a decision and where the evidence sits. Your tools prove what they checked. azakaw proves what you decided, and why.
Over two days at Dubai FinTech Summit, our team spoke with various firms looking for compliance software. Six themes came up again and again. Here is each one, how azakaw handles it, and what firms using it report.
azakaw is the compliance operating system for regulated firms, built by practising compliance officers at j. awan & partners, the compliance advisory firm behind more than 500 licence applications and 200+ active mandates in the region. AI prepares the routine work, your officers approve the decisions, and every step is on the record.
1. Digital KYC that sits outside your control, or runs by hand
When an outside provider runs your KYC, your firm still answers to the regulator for every decision. A review will test that, and it is better to find the gaps before the examiner does.
azakaw gives your own team digital KYC on flows you configure. The flows include document and liveness checks, with real-time sanctions, PEP and adverse media screening. AI drafts the customer risk assessment with a suggested rating and the reasons for it, and your officers accept or change the rating. Exceptions go to the right owner with the evidence attached.
This came up in many of our conversations at the summit, and it is not new to us. ARP Law Firm in Abu Dhabi had exactly the same problem, and this is where we stepped in. ARP now runs onboarding in-house on azakaw. It used to collect extensive documentation through many email exchanges and run KYC checks by hand. Clients now complete verification through a secure link, and their documents arrive in one place. Those changes are behind the results the firm reports: onboarding time down by 30 to 50%, and about a third of its weekly compliance hours back.
2. Several tools, and a wish for one compliance platform
Identity checks in one tool, screening in another and monitoring in a third means three logs. The full story of a single customer gets rebuilt by hand for every review.
azakaw brings digital onboarding, including KYC and KYB, screening, transaction monitoring and corporate compliance into one governed environment. A customer has one record, and the people who review it work from the same place.
Juggling several tools was a recurring topic at the summit. Neovision Wealth Management, an ADGM fund manager, had the same problem. It was working across Excel sheets, Word documents, PDFs and email attachments. Dr Ryan Lemand describes the old process as messy, prone to error and slow. Now everything sits on one platform and every step can be traced. Sanctions checks that were once done by hand run automatically, and the firm reports onboarding time cut by 50%. "What once took days now takes only hours," Dr Lemand says.
3. KYB verification for companies across borders
Business customers are where simple checks stop working. A registry lookup does not show who ultimately owns a company with layered holdings in several jurisdictions.
azakaw pulls corporate registry data, maps ownership structures and verifies beneficial owners and directors. It assesses the risk of the structure as a whole, and high-risk cases can trigger enhanced due diligence before anyone has to remember to ask.
Business onboarding came up in many of our conversations at the summit, and RAED Ventures, a venture capital firm in Riyadh, had the same problem, with documents arriving by email. It now uses azakaw for KYB onboarding. Clients are invited to upload documents through a secure link under RAED's own branding, which lowers the risk of lost documents. RAED reports that OCR captures data from its uploaded documents with accuracy of around 95%, so far less has to be keyed in by hand.
4. Corporate compliance: obligations, owners and deadlines
A reminder in a calendar is not an owner. When obligations, approvals and filings sit in spreadsheets and inboxes, leadership often finds out about a gap from the regulator.
azakaw turns obligations into owned work. Each obligation has an owner, a due date and an automatic reminder that leadership can see, and management reporting comes from the same record the team already works in. For a CEO or CFO, that means a current view of what is open and who owns it, instead of a summary pulled together the week before a review. The platform is already adapted to the reporting of GCC regulators.
5. AML transaction monitoring and fraud prevention
An alert that stalls in an inbox stays invisible until an inspection finds it. High alert volumes bury the cases that matter.
azakaw's transaction monitoring software runs continuously across accounts, channels and entities. Your compliance team configures the rules without code, and escalation, rationale and disposition stay connected to every alert. The record shows whether an alert was closed under a rule your officer approved, or reviewed by a person.
6. Compliance across jurisdictions
A firm with an entity in DIFC, another in ADGM and activity in Saudi Arabia answers to different regulators. Group systems and policies are rarely built for each local obligation, so ownership at the local level becomes unclear.
One global standard, every local rulebook. azakaw applies one global standard, built on the FATF recommendations, and adds each regulator's own rules on top, so a firm entering a new market gets a new layer rather than a new system. It is configured for your regulator before implementation begins, and it makes local work visible, owned and evidenced across entities.
Working across several regulators came up often in our conversations at the summit. ARP Law Firm named azakaw's alignment with ADGM regulation as a key factor in choosing it. In Saudi Arabia, Audi Capital chose azakaw for client onboarding and compliance, with workflows configured from day one to align with CMA regulations and supervisory expectations.
That approach comes from j. awan & partners, the compliance advisory firm behind more than 500 licence applications and 200+ active mandates in the region.
Four questions to ask your current compliance set-up
If you run the business rather than the compliance function, these themes reach you as questions of speed and cost: how long a new client waits, how many people it takes to onboard them, and whether compliance will limit how fast you can open in a new market. Here are four essential questions:
Where does the approval rationale for a customer live, and can you export it in one file?
How do you refresh KYB across several entities without chasing people by email?
Can you show the change history for your monitoring rules, with dates?
Could you give a bank partner or regulator a full evidence pack tomorrow?
If any of these is hard to answer, book a demo with the team. We will tailor the demo to your firm: your regulators, your obligations and the people who review and approve.
Read the full stories: ARP Law Firm, Neovision and RAED Ventures.
