Fenergo, the Irish regulatory IT firm, is now fully licensed by the Dubai International Financial Centre.

The firm says that it "will relocate to DIFC's fintech accelerator, the "Fintech Hive," which the DIFC set up with the help of Accenture in January 2017. The so-called hive brings IT entrepreneurs together with financial service firms and various experts to develop, test and adapt their technological wares to meet the growing demand for FinTech and RegTech (regulatory technology).

The software firm is going to provide large banks and financial institutions located in states that are members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) with something it calls "out-of-the box API-first client lifecyle management solutions." It says that its rules-driven IT helps banks obey anti-money-laundering and know-your-customer rules, the European Union's Securities Financing Transactions Regulation, the Common Reporting Standard, the US Financial Accounts Tax Compliance Act, section 871(m) of the US Internal Revenue Code, EMIR, Dodd-Frank, MiFID II, margin requirements and the EU's General Data Protection Regulation. The firm's propaganda makes the usual promises of "future proofing" customers against the regulations of the future, although this task is in truth impossible.

The Middle East lags behind Europe in terms of regulatory compliance, with fines particulary low by comparison. The is nevertheless the most active regualtor in the region.

Cormac Sheedy of Fenergo said: "Many of the world's largest and the region's most established financial institutions now have a presence in the DIFC, and it's imperative to ensure they're adhering to international regulatory standards."

The software is underpinned by new Artificial Intelligence, Robotics Process Automation and Machine Learning technology which uses optical character recognition and neuro-linguistic programming - two well-known techniques that first became commercially available in the 1970s.