Ronit Ghose, Industry Chair for the Future of Finance and AI Group at MENA Fintech Association and author of Future Money: Fintech, AI and Web3, joins FinTech TV anchor Johny Fernandez live from New York for a conversation on what three to four years of generative AI have actually changed in finance, and what seventy years of AI before that did not.
His framing: fintech changed the interface, moving finance onto the mobile phone. AI is changing the front end and the back end at once, which is why he calls this moment properly revolutionary rather than another wave of digitisation.
On the Gulf’s position, Ronit is specific rather than promotional. America and China lead on frontier fintech and AI development, but the UAE is leading on deployment and adoption at scale, a combination he attributes to a younger population, agency and capital arriving together. He also traces a shift in how Gulf sovereign capital operates internationally, from passive checks written from a distance to co-located, co-built partnerships with genuine regional presence.
His sharpest point looks past the current AI cycle entirely: finance has largely run on humans talking to humans, but transactions are increasingly happening machine to machine, and neither regulation nor the definition of money itself has caught up. That, he says, is the real question still ahead.
Topics discussed: seventy years of AI versus the last three to four, the Gulf’s fintech and AI deployment advantage, the shift in Gulf sovereign capital from passive to engaged, the Innovator’s Dilemma facing large banks, machine-to-machine finance and the regulatory questions it raises, America’s role as a global innovation platform.
Guest: Ronit Ghose, Industry Chair, Future of Finance and AI Group, MENA Fintech Association; author, Future Money: Fintech, AI and Web3
Interviewer: Johny Fernandez, FinTech TV