Only 5% of GCC directors report a fully implemented AI adoption plan, and 63% say their board lacks a defined AI strategy, according to the GCC Board Directors Institute’s latest Board Effectiveness Review. As AI and stablecoins reshape fintech business models, that gap now sits at board level.
Akshay Chopra, Payments Co-Chair at the MENA Fintech Association, Independent Director and Managing Partner at 237 Ventures, joins FinTech TV’s Raghda Ibraheem to ask whether fintech boards in the region are built for what comes next.
He names the problem with a term he coined: Dinos, or directors in name only. Board seats that were once treated as honorary, with occasional meetings, signed resolutions and light advice to founders, no longer fit a sector where regulatory expectations keep rising.
His case is that fintech governance is now a matter of financial, economic and national security. When a payments platform goes down, people cannot access their wages. When an AI lending model misfires, an entire segment can be rejected. When onboarding fails, sanctioned customers get through.
He describes healthy tension as the hallmark of a well-run fintech: sales held back by compliance, product held back by cybersecurity and management challenged by the board on major investments and pivots. In his framing, the opposite of tension is not harmony. It is slack.
The conversation also covers what happens when a UAE fintech expands from a central bank payments licence into digital assets and becomes answerable to multiple regulators, why every new licence should prompt a review of the board’s calibre, and how directors can build AI fluency by using the tools themselves and bringing in independent expertise rather than relying on management’s view.
His advice to founders: build an advisory board before the regulator requires one, appoint an independent chair early and choose directors for the skills the company will need next, from new payment rails and national networks to stablecoins and AI.
Topics discussed: directors in name only, fintech governance as a security issue, board and management tension, multi-regulator oversight in the UAE, board-level AI strategy, building a first fintech board.
Guest: Akshay Chopra, Payments Co-Chair, MENA Fintech Association; Independent Director; Managing Partner, 237 Ventures
Interviewer: Raghda Ibraheem, FinTech TV
