After scouring the globe for the right candidate, the board of directors of the Dubai Financial Services Authority has appointed one of its own regulators - Bryan Stirewalt - as its next chief executive. He will take over from Ian Johnston, who in late 2017 announced his intention to retire from the DFSA, on 1st October.

Stirewalt has been at the DFSA for ten years, serving for the last eight years as the managing director of supervision and regulating wealth managers and a variety of advisory firms, amongst others. Between 1985 and 1996 he worked for the US Treasury’s Office of the Comptroller of the Currency as an examiner, paying special attention to fraud initiatives. He then left the financial sector until 2008, when he joined the DFSA. He is also the co-chairman of the Basel Consultative Group, which "provides a forum for deepening the Basel Committee's engagement with emerging markets supervisors around the world on banking supervisory issues." He had a hand in the DFSA becoming a signatory to the International Organisation of Securities Commissions and the International Association of Insurance Supervisors. He has also championed the DFSA's fintech-related Innovation Testing Licence (ITL) programme, which serves as Dubai's answer to the UK's 'regulatory sandbox' that relaxes regulatory rules for fintech start-ups, the better to allow them to develop their products in peace. In May he proclaimed that the initiative was borrowing another practice from the UK: that of allowing firms to apply for licences in batches or 'cohorts.' It seems unlikely that the DFSA could have found a safer pair of hands.

Ian Johnston has been the CEO since June 2012, having joined the DFSA in November 2006 as the managing director of the policy and legal services division. He became a lawyer in Australia in the early 1980s and spent most of his career in the private sector, becoming the CEO of one of Australia’s major trustee companies. In 1999, Mr Johnston joined the Australian Securities and Investments Commission where he became the executive director of regulation, and spent several terms as an acting commissioner. In 2005, he became a special advisor to the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission and sits on numerous globally important financial committees.