The GCC has built the market, now it needs to build the investor, says CFI Financial Group’s CEO
GCC markets are attracting more international capital, but access is only half the equation. CFI Group CEO Ziad Melhem says that the region’s next challenge is building an investor base equipped to navigate increasingly complex markets
25 August, 2026
TT
16
Something significant happened in the first quarter of this year that did not get the attention it deserved. Foreign investors put a net $1.47bn into GCC equity markets between January and March, reversing the net selling of the previous quarter. That is a signal worth reading: international money is treating the financial markets of this region as serious, deep and worth a considered position.
The structural case behind that move is real. Since 2022, more than 170 GCC listings have raised over $50bn, and the composition has changed. Where issuance was once concentrated in energy, financials and utilities, it now spans consumer businesses, healthcare, technology and real estate.
Saudi Arabia opened its capital market to direct foreign participation in February, removing the Qualified Foreign Investor restrictions that had long kept international money at arm’s length. The exchanges are deeper, the investable universe is broader, and the regulatory frameworks carry more credibility than they did five years ago.
Access, for the most part, has been solved. The harder question now is whether the market is ready to serve investors well once they arrive.
I spend a lot of time looking at the data from CFI’s own platforms, and it tells me the investor showing up in this region today is not the one this industry was built to serve. In the first quarter of 2026, we processed $2.3tn in trading volume, the majority of it originating from the GCC and wider MENA region, more than 90 per cent of it through mobile devices, across more than 37 million individual trades. The majority of the people behind those numbers arrived already informed: they had engaged with financial content, compared platforms and formed views on asset classes before they opened an account.
That baseline has raised the bar for what useful engagement looks like, and the industry has been slow to catch up. The investor-facing markets in 2026 are dealing with conditions more complex than the current engagement model was built for. Gold has fallen around a quarter from its January peak, yet retail sentiment stays cautious, with many investors conditioned to buy on fear rather than value and few equipped to tell a price correction from a structural change in the asset. The AI debate, meanwhile, is dominated by comparisons to the dot-com bubble that are partly right and largely misleading.
The dot-com era was built on companies with no revenue and no business model. The current AI build-out runs on real capital spending on real infrastructure, chips, power and data centres, by companies that already carry substantial revenues. Speculative excess and genuine structural change are present at the same time, and treating them as one thing produces the wrong conclusion. Then there is SpaceX, which listed on Nasdaq in June in the largest IPO on record, with close to a third of the offering set aside for retail investors. Exposure to that kind of asset, once the preserve of sovereign wealth funds and private markets, is now a click away for the individual investor.
The open question is whether that investor has any framework for valuing a company worth close to $2tn that is still posting heavy losses. These are not fringe conversations; they are what people are discussing in the majlis and on every morning business segment, and the industry has not built the means to help investors work through them.
This is not abstract. When complex conditions arrive, and in this region they arrive fairly often, the investor without the means to read them makes the wrong decision at the wrong moment. They cut exposure during a pricing anomaly they read as systemic risk. They cluster in familiar assets, gold, oil, regional banking stocks, without seeing that all of those can move on the same underlying variable at the same time. The diversification they believe they hold is often cosmetic. Volatility is visible; concentration is quiet. An industry that has not invested in investor understanding has left its clients exposed to the quieter risk.
The responsibility for closing that gap sits with the platforms that have benefited from the participation. A business handling the volume we handle, in markets where financial literacy is still developing, carries an obligation beyond execution quality and competitive pricing. It owns some responsibility for the quality of understanding its clients bring to their decisions.
That thinking sits behind the choices we have made on investor education, market transparency and how we talk about the realities of trading. We have said plainly that trading is hard, that most retail participants lose money over time, and that informed participation takes sustained effort. None of that is easy to say commercially. It is honest, and honesty sustained over years is the only foundation genuine trust is built on.
The GCC has done the structural work, and the markets and the capital are now in place. The next phase will turn less on who builds the best platform and more on who builds the most informed investor base. That is the work still in front of us, and it is the more important half of the job.
