BE - September 2026

AI in Arab Banks ditable and, unlike a strategy slide, cannot be produced by the commu- nications department. Fund the data work as infrastructure. Structuring the institution’s informa- tion is a multi-year program that shows nothing for a long time. It should be funded like a core system, protected from the annual budget cycle and judged on completion rather than on quarterly demonstra- tions. Build capability, do not only buy it. Every bank that outsources its models entirely is renting its own judgment. A mixed approach, buying commod- ity capability while building where the institution’s own data creates ad- vantage, is the only version that pro- duces something a competitor cannot replicate by signing the same contract. Put model governance in place be- fore scale, not after. Validation, ac- countability, bias testing and customer recourse are far cheaper to design in at the outset than to retrofit across a dozen live deployments. Banks that do this deploy more slowly at first and considerably faster afterward. Pool what should be pooled. Fraud typologies, model-validation stan- dards, disclosure conventions and regulatory reporting formats are shared problems that every institu- tion is currently solving separately and expensively. This is exactly the work industry bodies exist to con- vene, and the Union of Arab Banks is well placed to lead it. A shared ap- proach would lower the cost for every participant and reduce de- pendence on a handful of global vendors. DULLER REPORTS, BETTER BANKS Arab banking is being reinvented, but it is earlier in that process than the volume of discussion implies. Ten years of annual reports show a sector that has learned to describe ar- tificial intelligence fluently and has not yet, on the evidence, learned to convert it into returns. Read that as timing, not verdict. The technology is genuine, the applica- tions that matter are identifiable and the deployment cycle is young. What the evidence argues against is not in- vestment but complacency: the as- sumption that having an AI strategy is the same as having a capability, and that describing the future is the same as building it. The banks that look strongest ten years from now will not be the ones with the most ambitious narrative today. They will be the ones who spent these years fixing their data, training their people, governing their models, and measuring what was ac- tually running. It is slower work, it makes for a duller annual report, and it is the only version that com- pounds. the BANKING EXECUTIVE 50 ISSUE 213 SEPTEMBER 2026 AHMET FARUK AYSAN AND HASSNIAN ALI Prof. Dr. Ahmet Faruk Aysan is a former member of the MPC and the Board at the Turkish Central Bank and is a Professor and As- sociate Dean for Research at Hamad Bin Khalifa University; Dr. Hassnian Ali is at Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Doha.