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Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange (ADX) made a strong return to GITEX GLOBAL this year, underscoring its commitment to Abu Dhabi’s digital transformation goals. The exchange unveiled three major AI-driven solutions designed to simplify investor interactions, streamline internal operations, and enhance accessibility through the TAMM platform.
In this conversation, Marios Kampouridis, chief technology and digital officer (CTDO), discusses how ADX is positioning itself as a digital-first exchange, balancing innovation with regulatory rigour, and embracing AI’s transformative potential.
ADX was at GITEX after many years. What was the key focus of your presence, and how does it align with Abu Dhabi’s digital strategy?
It’s been great for ADX. We are very proud to announce three new AI initiatives that have come to the market. These initiatives are very much in sync with Abu Dhabi’s digital strategy. Our goal is to launch solutions for investors and issuers to make their lives easier and position the exchange as a digital-first, key hub.
You are launching three specific AI solutions. Can you quickly run us through the key function of each of these tools?
We are launching three tools that provide friendliness, ease of use, and more insightful detail for all stakeholders.
- AI Financial Insights: This tool takes lengthy financial statements (sometimes more than 100 pages) and uses an AI agent to talk through the key points, highlighting specific references in the document. A major advantage is that you can pause the agent and ask any question, such as comparing net revenue across different years, cutting analysis time from hours to minutes.
- AI Court Order Agent: Used by our post-trade teams internally, this solution addresses the significant overhead of processing court orders. The agent can analyse the court order, take action, email the concerned party, and close the case in just five minutes, dramatically down from the usual 30 minutes.
- TAMM for ADX Investors: We’re integrating with TAMM, Abu Dhabi’s unified government services platform. As an investor, you will be able to start trading, see your specific portfolio status and, in the longer term, subscribe to IPOs. Non-investors can also create an account. Crucially, you can query an AI agent within TAMM for an insightful knowledge base, comparing your portfolio versus the market or specific assets versus others.
As you roll out these powerful tools, how does ADX balance the need for rapid innovation with stringent security and regulatory considerations?
We are always very close with both the regulator and our security team. We use spring-based methodologies that ensure security is at the heart of everything we do daily. We do not leave the security assessment for the end; instead, we work with security at every milestone, allowing us to continuously improve and stay in line with the necessary standards.
As a CTDO, what is your perspective on how AI will change the landscape of traditional jobs and business in the coming years?
AI is here to stay, and I don’t believe this is a bubble like the early 2000s, as the technology is being proven daily with use cases that make a serious impact on productivity. I believe that in a very small number of years — single digits — we will see routine and mundane traditional jobs start to be done better through AI. This will allow humans to focus on less mundane tasks, elevating business output.
Where do you see the biggest challenges or negatives in the current deployment of AI for a financial institution?
One major challenge is that while AI can deliver something I might traditionally take a month to do in five minutes, it’s often “not mature enough” to deliver it exactly how I need it, especially concerning security and regulation. This creates significant overhead because it takes more time to “clean up” after it. We have to ‘babysit it’ to ensure the code quality is up to standard for financial applications.
What is your vision for helping ADX be seen as a digital-first exchange globally?
Our job remains finance and exchange, and we take great pride in our history and what we’ve achieved over the last 25 years. Over the last three years, we have brought ADX to the forefront using cutting-edge trading engines and platforms.
My biggest focus now is to keep up with the traditional way of being in business while continuously putting in innovative and productive solutions to help my teams and the business produce better products in the coming years.
Finally, what is the one phrase that always brings you focus the pace of things gets frenetic?
Look at the foundation and remember the fundamentals — it always pays off.
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