There is an uncomfortable paradox emerging in the world of retail trading. A person may spend hours hesitating over whether to buy or sell a currency pair, second-guessing an entry point or worrying about getting a trade wrong. Yet that same person can be perfectly comfortable selecting a trader they have never met and allowing that trader’s strategy to be replicated automatically in their own account.

The question is no longer simply: What should I trade? Increasingly, it is: Whom should I trust?

That shift is helping fuel the rise of copy trading, a model that is gaining attention across an increasingly digital financial ecosystem. For a global trading industry shaped by international capital, ambitious entrepreneurs and a growing appetite for technology-driven financial services, the phenomenon offers an intriguing glimpse into how people are changing their relationship with markets.

TAG Markets, an international forex and CFD brokerage that began in Colombia in 2023, is one company riding that shift. The brokerage says it has grown into one of the world’s 10 fastest-growing forex brokerages, with more than $1bn in client deposits and a pace of growth that it says is approaching 10,000 new deposits a day.

But the numbers, impressive as they are, tell only part of the story. The more interesting story is what happens when technology changes the psychological burden of making a financial decision.

From Colombia to the world

When TAG Markets was conceived in 2023, the company was entering an industry that was hardly short of competitors. “There was not a shortage of brokers.

The market was already crowded,” Craig Lund, CEO of TAG Markets, said. The opportunity, he argues, was elsewhere.

“A large number of brokerages were offering access to the same markets through similar platforms, similar account structures and, in many cases, similar third-party or white-label infrastructure,” Lund said.

The company’s thesis was that the next phase of competition would be less about simply offering access to forex and CFDs and more about improving what happens around the trade itself.

Onboarding, funding, account management, copy trading, education and partner infrastructure were all areas where the company believed technology could remove friction.

“What began in Colombia in August 2023 has since developed into an international brokerage serving clients across multiple markets,” Lund said.

The underlying idea, he added, was not to create another brokerage offering the same basic service.

“It was created around the idea that a brokerage could remain fundamentally focused on forex and CFD trading while improving the technology, products and systems surrounding the client journey,” he said.

That approach led to products including CopyX, its copy-trading platform, alongside its own infrastructure for introducing brokers.

The distinction is important because copy trading is not really about eliminating decision-making. It changes where the decision is made.

When the trader becomes the product

For a conventional trader, the sequence is familiar. Analyse the market. Choose an instrument. Decide whether to enter. Determine the position size. Manage the trade. Decide when to exit. Every step requires a judgement call. Copy trading rearranges that equation. Instead of attempting to make every decision independently, a client can evaluate another trader’s strategy and decide whether to follow it.

“Technology can make copy trading faster, simpler, and more transparent, but it cannot make the decision for the client,” Lund said.

That distinction gets to the heart of the psychology behind the trend. The person using copy trading has not stopped making a financial decision. They have made a different one. They are choosing a person, a strategy and a level of risk rather than choosing an individual trade. “Trust in financial markets is rarely built from one number,” Lund said. “People look at track record, behaviour over time, drawdowns, consistency, communication, and how comfortable they feel with the level of risk being taken.” That makes the trader being followed almost as important as the technology facilitating the trade. And it introduces a question that is deeply human: why can trusting someone else sometimes feel easier than trusting ourselves?

Part of the answer may be the burden of responsibility

When people trade independently, every loss can feel personal. A losing trade can become a referendum on their judgement. Following another strategy can create psychological distance from that pressure. But that distance should not be confused with reduced financial risk. “A client is still participating in financial markets,” Lund said. “What changes is the way that person chooses to participate.”

The business of trust

For a platform such as CopyX, technology is therefore only half the proposition. The other half is trust. “When someone chooses a trader to follow, they are effectively saying, ‘I am comfortable allowing this person’s decisions to influence what happens inside my account,’” Lund said. That is a remarkably significant transaction between two people who may never meet.

The follower may know little about the trader personally. Instead, trust has to be constructed digitally through performance histories, strategy information, risk indicators, behaviour and consistency.

This is where copy trading begins to resemble a broader trend across financial services.

Consumers routinely delegate decisions to specialists. Investors use fund managers. Wealthy clients employ advisers. Businesses outsource functions they do not want to handle themselves.

Copy trading applies a related idea to retail trading: you do not necessarily need to become the expert if you can identify someone whose strategy you are prepared to follow. But unlike traditional delegation, copy trading can make the relationship unusually immediate. The follower can see a strategy, select it and potentially have its trades replicated in their own account. That convenience is part of the attraction.

So is education.

“Education can come from observing how another trader approaches the market,” Lund said.

The follower can potentially learn not only from outcomes but from patterns of behaviour, risk-taking and market participation.

Yet TAG Markets says it is careful not to frame copy trading as a shortcut around risk. “The technology removes friction from the process, but it does not remove the need for judgement,” Lund said.

More capital, more consequences

The same tension appears in the company’s other products. TAG Markets has developed account structures such as Amplify around giving traders greater flexibility and access to capital. But greater exposure creates a corresponding question: how much risk does the user actually understand?

“The boundary is information, suitability, and control,” Lund said. A larger account does not automatically translate into a better result. Greater exposure can make relatively small market movements more consequential, particularly where leverage is involved. That creates a delicate balancing act for financial platforms. Experienced traders may want flexibility. Less experienced traders may see a larger account primarily as an opportunity without fully appreciating how quickly losses can develop.

“Our responsibility is to make the structure clear enough that the client understands both sides of that equation,” Lund said. For TAG Markets, that means making account conditions, drawdown limits and exposure parameters visible rather than burying them behind the appeal of a larger headline account. The company’s position is that empowerment comes from giving users choices while making the trade-offs attached to those choices equally clear. That philosophy also helps explain its investment in education.

The rise of the digitally native trader

The focus on MENA, Asia and Africa is not accidental. Lund argues that these markets can offer fertile ground for digital financial services because consumers are often quick to adopt technology that solves an obvious problem.

“In many parts of MENA, Asia, and Africa, consumers are comfortable using their phones for payments, banking, investing, communication, and commerce,” he said.

That expectation can carry over into financial markets.

Users accustomed to instant digital payments and app-based services may be less willing to tolerate complicated onboarding, fragmented platforms or opaque account structures. Global financial centres and increasingly connected markets sit naturally within that story.

Cities such as Dubai have built international identities around finance, entrepreneurship, technology and cross-border business. They are also meeting points for capital and increasingly digital-first consumers from across MENA, Asia and Africa.

For brokerages, that creates an audience that may be less interested in how long a financial company has existed and more interested in whether its technology works.

“Clients in these regions are not necessarily impressed by the fact that a company has been operating for a long time,” Lund said.

“They are more interested in whether the platform works well, whether the technology is easy to use, whether funding and withdrawals are efficient, whether support is accessible, and whether the products make sense for the way they want to participate in the market.”

That is a significant change in the competitive landscape.

Education as a business strategy and a responsibility

That is why TAG Markets says it has invested in free educational resources, including video courses, practical articles and live trading sessions.

“Forex and CFD trading involve real risk,” Lund said. “Giving someone access to a platform without giving them the tools to understand volatility, leverage, drawdown, position sizing, and market behaviour is not enough.”

It is a commercially interesting position. Education can help a brokerage differentiate itself. But it can also serve as a test of whether a financial platform is willing to make its products understandable rather than simply attractive.

“The objective is not to tell people what to trade,” Lund said. “It is to help them understand the environment they are participating in so they can make more informed decisions for themselves.”

That philosophy circles back to the original paradox. Copy trading does not remove responsibility. Nor does technology eliminate uncertainty.

Instead, both are changing the shape of the decision. The trader who once asked, “What should I do?” may now ask, “Whose decisions am I prepared to follow?” That is a subtle but consequential shift.

The stranger behind the strategy

Ultimately, the most interesting part of the emerging copy-trading culture may have little to do with algorithms. It is about human behaviour. People have always looked for shortcuts through complexity. They seek specialists, imitate successful behaviour and rely on signals when they lack confidence in their own judgement.

“The more clearly a trader understands the product, the stronger the relationship can become,” Lund said. And in a financial landscape where capital, technology and ambition increasingly intersect, that may become one of the defining questions of the next era of retail trading: not whether people are willing to participate in global markets, but who they are willing to trust when they do.

For years, credibility was treated as one of those business assets that everyone agreed was important but few could put a price on. It sat somewhere between reputation, brand equity and corporate image, valuable, certainly, but difficult to measure on a balance sheet. That may be changing. In an economy where customers can research a company in seconds, investors can investigate a founder before a meeting and artificial intelligence can summarise a business before a salesperson ever gets the chance to make a pitch, credibility is becoming less of a vague reputational asset and more of a commercial variable.

The economic question is therefore no longer simply whether a company is credible. It is what that credibility changes. Does it reduce the amount of money a company needs to spend acquiring customers? Does it shorten sales cycles? Does it make customers less sensitive to price? Can it give investors greater confidence before negotiations begin? And, perhaps most importantly, can a strong public reputation reduce the friction between someone discovering a business and actually deciding to buy from it?

Sashin Govender, founder of CredibilityX, argues that it can. “Credibility is worth the reduction of friction,” Govender said, describing credibility as “the new currency” of business. The argument is straightforward: when customers already believe a company is legitimate, capable and established, the company spends less time proving that it deserves to be taken seriously. Sales conversations can begin further down the trust funnel. Investors may have fewer basic questions. Prospective partners may face less uncertainty. Customers may be more willing to consider a premium price. The difficult part is proving how much of that effect can actually be attributed to credibility.

From attention to belief

The modern marketing economy has become exceptionally good at producing attention. Companies can buy search advertising, sponsor events, work with influencers, publish content, appear on podcasts and flood social platforms with messages designed to keep their names in front of potential customers. But attention and trust are different economic assets.

“A company can run adverts, create content, sponsor events, work with influencers, post daily on social media, and still struggle to turn that visibility into trust,” Govender said.

That distinction creates what could be called a second-stage customer journey. A prospect may discover a company through an advertisement or social media post, but discovery frequently triggers another process: verification. The prospect searches the company. They look up the founder. They read reviews. They examine LinkedIn profiles. They search for media coverage. They compare competitors. They may ask an AI platform to explain what the business does and whether it appears credible.

At that point, the company’s advertising is no longer operating alone. Its wider public information footprint becomes part of the sales process. This is where a business can have what appears to be a marketing problem when the deeper problem is credibility. Govender describes the scenario as a company generating enquiries but losing prospects during the research stage.

The advertising may have done its job by attracting attention. The website may have generated interest. Yet when a potential customer begins looking for independent validation, the evidence may be thin. “There are many companies with strong clients, serious revenue, strong products and capable leadership, but when someone searches them, there is very little media proof, very little founder authority, poor search presence, or an unclear public narrative,” he said.

The commercial consequence is uncertainty. And uncertainty costs time.

The hidden cost of a weak reputation

Consider a high-value sale. A prospective customer discovers a company and expresses interest. Instead of moving directly into a commercial discussion, however, the prospect spends days or weeks researching whether the business is legitimate and whether the people behind it can be trusted. The sales team then has to answer questions

that might otherwise have been settled before the first meeting. That is where credibility starts to look like an economic asset. A stronger public footprint does not guarantee a sale, but it can potentially remove some of the objections that delay one. A credible media profile can provide third-party validation. A well-documented founder history can establish authority. Consistent company information can reduce confusion. Reviews and customer evidence can provide social proof.

The same logic applies to investors and strategic partners. An investor considering a company is not simply evaluating its financials or business model. The investor is also assessing the people behind the company, the quality of its leadership and the risks associated with backing it. Public information becomes one more source of evidence. That does not replace due diligence. But it can influence the environment in which due diligence takes place. “The investor’s question may happen in seconds, but the answer is shaped by months or years of public credibility,” Govender said. This is one reason credibility is difficult to measure through conventional marketing metrics. Its effect may occur before the transaction is recorded in a CRM system. A prospect may arrive at a sales meeting already reassured. An investor may enter a conversation with greater familiarity.

A potential partner may already understand the founder’s background. The company may never know precisely which article, interview or search result helped reduce that initial uncertainty. The economic effect is real precisely because it can be invisible.

Can credibility support premium pricing?

Pricing provides another test. Businesses with weak differentiation often find themselves competing on price because customers have few other signals with which to distinguish one provider from another. In crowded sectors, dozens of companies can make essentially the same claims: experienced, innovative, trusted, customer-focused and market-leading. Credibility can become another form of differentiation.

That is particularly relevant in industries where mistakes are expensive. Finance, healthcare, real estate, investment, technology, legal services, luxury and Web3 all involve decisions where customers may be committing significant money, personal information, professional reputation or long-term trust. “In those industries, people are not only buying a product or service. They are placing trust in the company’s judgment, ethics, stability, expertise and long-term reliability,” Govender said. The higher the perceived risk, the more valuable reassurance can become. That does not mean credibility automatically allows a company to charge more. Rather, it can change the basis on which customers evaluate value. A company that has established authority may have less need to compete exclusively on price.

The line between proof and appearance

There is, however, an uncomfortable issue at the heart of the credibility economy: credibility can be communicated, but it cannot simply be manufactured indefinitely. A company can publish articles, build social profiles and generate visibility. But if the underlying business cannot deliver what it promises, the gap between appearance and reality eventually becomes visible. Govender draws a line between building credibility and manufacturing its appearance.

“Public relations can absolutely create trust in the sense that it helps people understand why a company is credible,” he said. “But it should not create an illusion of trust.” That distinction matters because communication works best when it makes existing substance easier to discover. A company may have excellent products, strong customers and experienced leadership but almost no public documentation of those achievements. In that case, communication can bring evidence into the public domain.

The opposite is more problematic: creating the impression of authority where the underlying evidence is weak. “Credibility is built when what a company says, what it does, and what the market can verify are aligned,” Govender said. That alignment is increasingly important as consumers become more accustomed to paid promotion. Editorial coverage, press releases and sponsored content may all appear in the same social feeds, but they do not necessarily carry the same weight. A press release announces something. Sponsored content buys visibility. Editorial coverage can provide context and third-party framing. For a company attempting to establish authority, those distinctions matter because visibility itself is no longer particularly scarce.

Belief is.

When AI becomes the first reader

The credibility equation becomes even more complicated when the first “reader” of a company’s reputation is an AI system rather than a human. Potential customers and investors increasingly use AI tools to summarise companies, founders and industries. The system does not know what happened inside the boardroom or what a founder privately believes about the future of the business. It works from the information available to it.

That makes the public record increasingly important.

“Reputation is no longer only what people say about you. It is also what machines understand about you,” Govender said. A weak or inconsistent public footprint can therefore become more than a search-engine problem. It can become an information problem.

The answer is not necessarily to optimise a company simply to appear in AI-generated responses. Govender argues that companies should instead build the underlying authority that gives AI systems credible information to interpret. “AI visibility should not replace human credibility. It should support it,” he said. That distinction could prove important as businesses race to understand the emerging AI-search economy. A company can optimise content for machines, but the ultimate commercial decision is still made by a customer, investor or partner.

The strongest strategy, therefore, may be one that works in both directions: credible enough for humans to trust and structured enough for machines to understand.

Measuring the commercial return

The biggest challenge for the credibility economy remains measurement. Traditional advertising offers relatively direct metrics: impressions, clicks, leads and conversions. Public relations has historically relied more heavily on media mentions, audience reach and estimated exposure. Those numbers can show distribution, but they do not necessarily demonstrate economic impact. A more commercially focused measurement framework would ask different questions. Did prospects require fewer meetings before making a decision? Did inbound leads become more qualified? Did customers mention media coverage during sales conversations? Did the company receive more partnership approaches? Did investors arrive with greater familiarity? Did search results become more authoritative? Did the business become less dependent on explaining its legitimacy from scratch?

Govender argues that these are more meaningful indicators of credibility’s value. “The real commercial return on credibility is measured by what credibility changes inside the business,” he said. That can include sales-cycle reduction, conversion quality, pricing power, investor confidence, partnership opportunities and reputation protection. The difficulty is that credibility compounds rather than behaves like a single campaign. One article may influence one customer.

A sustained body of coverage may reshape how a company is perceived. Over time, the accumulated effect can become much larger than any individual piece of content. That makes credibility resemble an infrastructure investment rather than a one-off marketing expense.

Meta Platforms has a strong basis for arguing that the $25bn penalty New Mexico secured this week in a case stemming from allegations the firm mishandled user data should be reduced on appeal, legal experts said.

The judgment was one of the largest state verdicts against a company in US history. It came after a jury found Meta misled consumers about who had access to their data in the wake of revelations that Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm involved in President Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, had harvested personal data from millions of Facebook users.

New Mexico said state law allowed for a penalty of up to $5,000 for each time someone in the state may have seen an allegedly misleading statement from Meta. Experts said the company would likely argue that Judge Francis Mathew should only have considered people who actually saw the statements.

“The most vulnerable basis on appeal is going to be the question about whether a violation is going to count, even in the absence of any proof that a particular person saw one of these misrepresentations or relied on them to their detriment,” said Peter Ormerod, a law professor at Villanova University.

C.J. Mahoney, Meta’s chief legal officer, said the company is confident it will win on appeal. The company is expected to appeal the underlying jury verdict and the penalty.

Meta has previously said that it does not sell user data and that New Mexico did not prove any consumer had actually been misled and that a penalty in the billions of dollars would risk violating its constitutional rights to due process and protection from excessive fines.

New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez said on Wednesday he expected Meta to appeal the judgment and the state stood ready to defend its legal position. He did not immediately respond to a request for further comment.

Jury found 43 million violations

New Mexico’s attorney general sued Meta in 2021, alleging that the company lied to Facebook users about who had access to their data, how the company handled hate speech and misinformation posted on the platform, and other internal policies.

Jurors on September 25 found that 26 of 29 statements made by the company and its leadership on those issues were misleading. Multiplying those statements by their potential audience within New Mexico, the jury said the company had committed more than 43 million violations of the state’s consumer protection laws. The state had 1.4 million active Facebook users and a population of 2.1 million as of 2020.

Mathew said in his ruling on Wednesday that a penalty of more than $219bn would be justified under state law, which allows a $5,000 penalty for each violation, but he reduced the amount.

The state had urged Mathew to award the state between $35bn and $40bn, while Meta said penalties of no more than $3.45bn were warranted.

Ormerod said that even if the company’s appeals in state courts fail, Meta could argue to the US Supreme Court that the penalty violated its rights under the US Constitution to due process and against excessive fines.

The size of the penalty on its own does not mean it will be overturned, given the New Mexico law allowing for penalties for each willful violation, said Daryl Lim, a professor at Penn State Dickinson Law.

But it seems implausible that Meta was really responsible for so much financial harm, a sign the penalty may be unjust, said Eric Goldman, a professor at Santa Clara University School of Law.

“It felt like there was a lot of duplicative counting in the calculations,” Goldman said. “How many times can a single person be duped by the same entity?”

The agreement focuses on collecting discarded cooking oil from restaurants, businesses and households for processing at ENOC’s plant in Jebel Ali. The proposed system would connect waste collection with local fuel production, potentially creating a dedicated supply channel for turning used oil into an energy resource, a WAM report said.

Engineer Marwan Ahmed bin Ghalita, director general of Dubai Municipality, and Hussain Sultan Lootah, group CEO of ENOC Group, witnessed the signing.

Read more: Salik signs deal with ENOC to enable smart payments at fuel stations

The agreement was signed by Ali Khalid bin Zayed Al Falasi, ENOC Group’s deputy MD of Commercial and Retail, and Engineer Adel Mohammed Al Marzouqi, CEO of Dubai Municipality’s Waste and Sewerage Agency, during ENOC’s participation at WETEX 2026.

Collection network would connect waste to fuel production

Under the proposed arrangement, Dubai Municipality would coordinate and oversee efforts to recover used cooking oil and discourage improper disposal.

ENOC would contribute its fuel production and supply capabilities, including the infrastructure needed to convert collected oil into biodiesel.

The partners have not outlined specific collection targets, implementation timelines or projected production volumes in the announcement. The initiative remains focused on exploring the development of the collection system and strengthening the connection between waste management and fuel manufacturing.

Used cooking oil can serve as a feedstock for biodiesel, giving discarded material another potential use instead of allowing it to enter waste streams through improper disposal. A coordinated collection network could help channel supplies from multiple sources into local processing facilities.

The proposed arrangement would also establish a direct link between oil recovery across Dubai and ENOC’s biodiesel production operations in Jebel Ali, keeping more of the process within the local economy.

ENOC points to demand for alternative fuels

Ali Khalid bin Zayed Al Falasi said expanding access to cleaner fuels and making better use of existing resources would be important in meeting the UAE’s future energy needs.

“Turning waste into fuel can help address both priorities, strengthening local production capabilities while supporting the transition to a lower-carbon economy,” he said.

Al Falasi added that combining the municipality’s waste management expertise with ENOC’s fuel production capabilities could connect the recovery of used cooking oil with the supply of alternative fuels.

ENOC introduced Biodiesel5 to the UAE market in 2017 and has since expanded its biodiesel offering to customers in the transport, logistics and construction sectors. The group has also invested in biodiesel production capabilities at Jebel Ali to support the wider adoption of alternative fuels.

The latest agreement builds on those existing operations by exploring whether recovered cooking oil can become a more structured source of feedstock for local production.

Municipality links initiative to circular economy goals

Al Marzouqi said the partnership was intended to strengthen integrated waste management and increase the recovery of resources from discarded materials.

“Through this collaboration, we aim to maximise resource recovery, reduce waste and support the long-term sustainability of the energy sector,” he said.

He added that converting used cooking oil into lower-carbon biofuel could support the development of alternative energy sources while reducing the environmental impact associated with waste.

The initiative aligns with Dubai’s broader efforts to improve resource efficiency and advance a circular economy, in which materials are recovered and reused rather than discarded after their initial purpose. It also supports the objectives of the UAE Circular Economy Policy 2031.

However, the environmental and economic benefits will depend in part on how the collection system is implemented, the quantity of oil recovered and the efficiency of its conversion into fuel.

WETEX showcases ENOC’s alternative fuel initiatives

ENOC’s participation at WETEX 2026 also includes displays of technologies associated with cleaner transport and alternative energy use, including a biodiesel delivery truck and a COBUS hydrogen bus.

The event provides the group with an opportunity to discuss alternative fuel adoption with government entities, industry partners and customers.

For Dubai Municipality and ENOC, the proposed used cooking oil system would bring waste recovery and fuel production into a single supply chain. Its next steps will determine how collection from households and businesses can be organised and how much recovered oil could ultimately contribute to local biodiesel production.

US-based investment platform Robinhood has secured authorisation from the Dubai Financial Services Authority (DFSA) to introduce its retail investing services in the Middle East, with a regional launch planned for 2027.

The company will establish its regional headquarters at the Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC), marking a significant step in its international expansion strategy.

The regulatory approval will allow Robinhood to offer trading and custody services across 10 DFSA-approved asset classes, including equities, cryptocurrencies, exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and investment tokens.

The company said its planned product suite would provide investors with greater access to global financial markets through its technology-driven investment platform.

Robinhood targets 2027 launch from Dubai

Vlad Tenev, chairman and CEO of Robinhood, said: “The DIFC is one of the world’s most important financial hubs, and our expansion there brings us closer to building a global platform that enables anyone, anywhere to own the highest quality financial assets.”

The move comes as Robinhood seeks to expand its international presence and tap into growing demand for digital investment services across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).

Johann Kerbrat, senior vice president and general manager of Robinhood Crypto and International, highlighted the region’s growing retail investment market.

“The DIFC has quickly become one of the world’s most dynamic centers for financial innovation, situated at the heart of a rapidly growing wave of retail investors across the MENA region,” Kerbrat said.

“We are excited to deliver the modern, accessible financial tools these investors deserve.”

The company has not yet disclosed specific product launch dates, pricing structures or the individual Middle Eastern markets that will be served when operations begin in 2027.

Robinhood appoints MENA regional leadership

Robinhood’s regional operations will be led by Salah Kaddoura, senior executive officer and president of Robinhood MENA.

Kaddoura will oversee the company’s growing Dubai-based team and lead its expansion across the region.

“The demand for modern, accessible financial tools across this region is immense,” Kaddoura said.

“From our new home in Dubai’s premier financial hub, we’re looking forward to building Robinhood’s regional presence and expanding access to the global financial ecosystem for a new generation of investors.”

DIFC strengthens fintech ecosystem

Robinhood’s entry adds another international financial technology company to DIFC’s growing ecosystem of financial services and investment businesses.

Arif Amiri, chief executive officer of DIFC Authority, said the company’s decision to establish its regional headquarters in Dubai reflects increasing demand for digital investment services.

“Robinhood’s decision to establish its regional headquarters in DIFC reinforces Dubai’s position as a global hub for financial innovation and reflects the growing demand for accessible, technology-driven investment services across the Middle East,” Amiri said.

He added that Robinhood’s presence would strengthen DIFC’s financial services ecosystem and support greater participation in global investment markets.

The planned launch will give Robinhood a base from which to expand its retail investment offering across the Middle East, subject to applicable regulatory and market requirements.