Fuze, a regulated digital-asset infrastructure company based in the Middle East and North Africa, has appointed Khalifa Mohamed Al Fahim as its new Director of Regulatory Affairs in a move aimed at strengthening its engagement with regulators and institutional stakeholders. The hire comes as the company expands its role in helping banks, fintechs, and other businesses introduce digital-asset services within formal legal and compliance frameworks. It also reflects the growing importance of regulatory credibility for firms operating in a region where interest in blockchain and digital assets is spreading across both federal and emirate-level institutions.
Strategic Appointment
The company said Al Fahim will help deepen its coordination with supervisory bodies while ensuring Fuze’s activities remain aligned with applicable financial and legal standards. Beyond regulatory oversight, he is also expected to support business development by drawing on his network and understanding of how public and private institutions in the UAE and wider region are approaching financial innovation. For Fuze, the appointment appears designed to reinforce both governance and commercial positioning at a time when regulated digital-asset adoption is gaining traction.
Fuze’s chief executive, Mohammed Ali Yusuf, described the new executive as someone who combines regulatory knowledge with practical institutional experience, particularly in areas linked to banking and financial innovation. That combination is likely to be valuable for a company seeking to bridge the worlds of traditional finance and digital assets while maintaining trust with policymakers and enterprise clients. Al Fahim, for his part, said he was joining a business that has taken a long-term and compliance-led view of the sector, and indicated he intends to help shape its engagement across regulated financial ecosystems.
Career Background
Al Fahim brings a profile that spans public-sector financial policy, compliance, digital banking, and investment, giving Fuze a senior executive with experience across several layers of the UAE’s financial system. He began his career at the Governor’s Office of the Central Bank of the UAE, where he worked on cross-departmental transformation initiatives tied to national financial policy. He later joined the UAE Financial Intelligence Unit and contributed to the country’s preparation for its Financial Action Task Force evaluation, an important process tied to sovereign financial integrity and anti-financial crime standards.
He subsequently held roles at Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank and later at Wio Bank, where his work covered regulatory compliance, financial crime strategy, project management, and strategic partnerships. According to the company, he played a meaningful part in building the regulatory structure behind Wio Bank’s operations and in the development of Wio Invest, including work tied to Securities and Commodities Authority licensing and regulated frameworks for wealth management, margin trading, and trade finance. That background gives him direct experience in translating regulatory requirements into operational financial products, which is likely to be central to his remit at Fuze.
Fuze’s Market Position
Fuze describes itself as the region’s first regulated digital-assets infrastructure provider of its kind, offering technology and services that enable financial institutions to launch digital-asset products securely and in compliance with regulation. Its platform is designed for a business-to-business-to-consumer model, allowing banks and fintech firms to integrate digital-asset capabilities into payments and wealth offerings without building the underlying infrastructure from scratch. In addition to its infrastructure business, the company also operates an over-the-counter service tailored to institutions, funds, and high-net-worth individuals executing large digital-asset transactions.
The company was founded by executives with backgrounds spanning fintech, traditional finance, and decentralized finance, a mix that has become increasingly common among firms trying to professionalize digital-asset services for mainstream financial institutions. Yusuf previously held leadership roles at Checkout.com and Visa, while Chief Operating Officer Arpit Mehta worked at fintech companies including Simpl and Clear, and Chief Technology Officer Srijan Shetty previously built algorithmic trading systems at Goldman Sachs and also worked at Microsoft. That senior leadership mix, combined with backing from Abu Dhabi’s Further Ventures and other investors, has helped position Fuze as a scaling player in the UAE’s financial innovation landscape.
Broader UAE Context
The appointment also fits into a wider national push to build local capability in advanced financial services, particularly in sectors linked to digital transformation and future-facing infrastructure. Fuze said it has sought to go beyond mandatory Emiratisation by hiring locally and contributing to broader education efforts aimed at improving understanding of digital assets among financial leaders and within the wider UAE community. In that sense, Al Fahim’s arrival is not only a senior corporate hire but also part of a broader signal that the company wants stronger local roots as it grows alongside the UAE’s evolving digital finance agenda.
Fuze’s decision to bring Al Fahim into a regulatory leadership role underscores how central policy engagement, compliance execution, and institutional trust have become in the digital-assets sector. His experience across the central bank, financial intelligence, commercial banking, and digital banking gives the company a senior figure with direct exposure to the regulatory and operational realities of modern finance in the UAE. As digital-asset services continue moving closer to the financial mainstream in the Gulf, appointments of this kind are likely to be watched as indicators of how the sector is maturing.