Connecting Leaders: The Impact of Abu Dhabi Finance Week at ADGM

Hi, I'm Vince Molinari, and welcome to FinTech TV.

We're broadcasting from the iconic New York Stock Exchange, and I would like to welcome a very special guest who's become a dear friend and part of our epic partnership with ADGM and ADFW, Chris Hughes, who is the editor in chief of Abu Dhabi Finance Week here with us at the New York Stock Exchange today.

Chris, welcome back.

Thanks for having me.

Always great to be back.

Well, you know, you.

Is light up the room.

You light up the entire stock exchange when you're here, Chris.

I'm so delighted to have you, my friend.

Ah, it's great to be here.

New York is just another level of energy, and I think we're all very energized and very excited every time we're here.

And then coming into this iconic room is just something else.

Well, we are so privileged to be here all the time as FinTech TV, and you know there's so much to talk about and we have to squeeze it into a few minutes here.

But you know, let's start off a little bit of this bridge building that you continue to do and what's happening in Abu Dhabi Finance Week and we've had the great privilege of being part of it and oh my gosh, from the falcon to the capital capital about what may be next here, but my goodness, kudos to you, the entire team on what's been.

Birth and really has become really the center of capital events from our lens globally.

Yeah, we didn't expect Abu Dhabi Finance Week to grow so fast.

I'm glad you mentioned team.

We have an incredible group of people who work on it.

They work extremely hard on it and you know they're very talented, but Beyond that is just the moment in time.

I think things grow because of a wider moment in time and in many ways Abu Dhabi Finance Week and the growth of Finance Week into what is now probably one of the world's top 5 financial events, I think it probably mirrors the rise of Abu Dhabi, you know, correlationally.

It has been an extraordinary 3 or 4 years in Abu Dhabi where Asset managers managing trillions of dollars have just decided to set up shop in Abu Dhabi and you are now running billions and billions of that capital out of the financial center and interacting with our sovereign funds but interacting with the wider markets and you know, so I think that the rise of Finance Week and the rise of ADGM are inextricably linked.

This year, the best statistic to understand.

What Abu Dhabi Finance Week will be in December. will be the fact that we're assembling presidents, chairmen, CEOs, founders of organizations that collectively manage just under $70 trillion of assets which the team worked it out the other day.

It's over 50% of the global GDP.

In one place at one time, which again just the sheer physics of so many people managing so many assets can shift the economic world on its axis just a little tiny bit in those four days, and I think that's an extraordinary opportunity for everyone getting together because the financial markets drive so much of, you know, what the world is and what the events of the world are.

And I think that you know it's important for us to bring these people together to talk about the right things at the right time, especially at the end of the year 2025 in December, it's kind of a wrap up of the year and an outlook to the year ahead.

So that's kind of what the the whole idea is.

So let's talk a little bit more about that, Chris, if I may.

So.

These outcomes coming out of 2024 last year setting the stage, and I think what I see is this desire of these captains of industry, these political leaders, these regulators. want to come.

They do.

It's become this it doesn't seem like it's that outbound reach.

Are you going to Abu Dhabi finance it just seems to be this momentum that's really a testimony, as you said, the rise of Abu Dhabi, the rise of ADGM.

But it's that formula that you put forward and that those ingredients, it's, you know, the formula, it's interesting that you mention the formula.

So Abu Dhabi Finance Week is fundamentally divided into 65 different events.

So you've got events that focus on risk insecurity.

You've got events that focus on digital assets.

You've got events that focus on multiple aspects of the sustainable development goals. events that focus on hedge funds, family offices, venture capital, macroeconomics, geopolitics, and you know this is, this is the kind of division.

So when these leaders come, they're fairly guaranteed that they're going to have a program of activity across the week where they can connect with other peer leaders to try and strategize important decisions that they need to make for the year ahead.

Um, and I think that's why so many big leaders are trusting us with their time is because, you know, we've designed it in what I hope to be an intelligent way that respects their time, you know, because if you're the CEO of a $1 trillion asset manager in Germany and You know, you've got a lot of big decisions to make and given 4 days of your life to fly across the 5 or 6 hours it takes to Abu Dhabi and then spend time at a conference and spend a lot of time at a conference, you need to be sure that you're going to come away with some actual measurable outcomes and you're going to have met some people that you're actually going to be able to do some deals with in the year ahead.

So you know, I think we're achieving that, and I think that's part of the reason why it's growing.

Exponentially, it is fair to say that over 50% of the global GDP is quite a statistic.

I didn't even think that was imaginable.

I want to pull on that thread a little bit because I didn't quite think about it that way, but it's an amazing point when you when you combine the fact that you have to trust.

Abu Dhabi Finance Week, ADGM, the region, but really making a significant investment in their time, yeah, right, so a lot of time that is it it seems to me, and we've talked a little bit about this in other arenas, there's a lot of people that are contributing to this versus just trying to pull away for themselves.

That ecosystem is really a different dynamic when you're looking at a global amount of contributors together.

It's, it's a community festival, you know, we start off with, you know.

About 30 different partners, you know, this year you have Google doing a large event that's going to convene CMOs and financial institutions to talk about, you know, the marketing industry.

You're going to have the International Monetary Fund bringing together private sector banking and asset management leaders, CEOs, etc. in a room to talk policy for 2026.

You're going to have, um, you know, UBS Bank doing a large event around hedge funds, so.

You have all of these different organizations that are that are now activating their own programs within Abu Dhabi Finance Week, and that is partnership, but beyond the partners you have 700 speakers and we, everyone volunteers their time.

You know, we're not flying people in and giving them fees and all these things.

We, they volunteer their time and to volunteer a week of your time or 5 days of your time to a festival is, you know, it's a fairly generous thing to do, and we're really, really respectful of the fact people are doing that.

And then you've got the community itself in Abu Dhabi.

So Abu Dhabi's financial community is kind of there's lots of different parts to it.

There there's 4 sovereign wealth funds that are based in Abu Dhabi or headquartered in Abu Dhabi.

And there's like all the different banks.

First Abu Dhabi Bank, ADCB, Adeeb, etc.

You've got, you know, the different ministries, you've got all the different apparatus of Abu Dhabi's economy, and all of their entities all get behind so that everyone is basically either working from Abu Dhabi Finance Week for those few days or have taken the time off and are actually just being there to network and you know, I think that's, you know, it's an extraordinary thing.

So it's community.

Partnership.

It's about people.

It's about people getting together and as I say, the bottom line of it is that we're all there to To discuss strategy, business strategy for 2026.

That's why everyone's there.

So it's a good time of year to do that is to think about what the next year is going to bring.

It resonates so much when you talk about it as community, so I think you placed it beautifully, Chris.

I don't know if there's a new theme this year or can you talk about it, but we had Falcon Academy, Capital Capital.

It's a little bit of a cliffhanger for me.

So the theme in 2023.

Um, which is the first edition was Welcome to the Falcon economy.

And that has now become part of the kind of cultural narrative of not just Abu Dhabi's economy, but the Gulf Falcons, because you know Dubai, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, these are all incredibly fast growing economies and again the Gulf Falcons, so we have our Falcon economy and so that was the first thing.

The next year was invested in the transition era, so that was, you know, the same year as COP 28, the UN climate summit, and this is where we kind of discussed the various technological and even environmental transitions that are happening at the minute.

And then last year was Welcome to the capital of capital, which that's the, everyone loves that one and we'll talk more about our capital to capital status later, #1 in the world again two years in a row.

Today was a big announcement.

Yes, but we'll get to that in a minute and then then this year.

It's engineering a capital network, OK, so.

What does that mean?

Well, the global capital markets are made up of nodes that are generally clustered around cities.

OK, so you've got Abu Dhabi is one of those, you know, cities that, you know, a financial economy is now starting to gather around.

You've got other great centers like here in New York and London and other places, and what we're trying to do with Abu Dhabi Financing this year is to try and discern what The order of the nodes that make up the global financial markets are today, and there's a huge announcement going to be made in December.

It's actually quite the cliffhanger.

You'll have to be there in December, but there is a huge announcement that will help us to understand and help the whole world to understand what the financial order is in this.

At this time, um, but back to our story about the, the capital of capital.

So capital of capital we've, you know, 1. just under $1.8 trillion of sovereign wealth capital in Abu Dhabi.

Mind boggling amounts it is.

It's just, yeah, it's a big number.

Very big number.

Um, but anyway, so that, um, we, we knew it was a big number, but then we started to do some, some data analysis on that, and last year we found out that actually mathematically we're number one in the world for sovereign wealth capital.

Um, Oslo's #2 and then other places and then just today the same analysis has been conducted over the past sort of 6 weeks and just today we found out that once again 2nd year in a row we're number one in the world.

Congratulations to congratulate me on that.

That's all the work that everybody's putting all the work that we're doing so on behalf of all of Abu Dhabi.

Um, but it's, you've got to imagine the intelligence that they invest with in Abu Dhabi.

Like it's, it's wise investments.

It's practical, prudent, and it's really intelligent and it's super value driven, and they're growing the investment capital in the sovereign wealth funds all the time and it's just really, really interesting how quickly it's grown and how much influence it has out in the world and what it actually means, you know, Abu Dhabi.

It has a culture of sort of understatement actually.

I know I'm here talking about all these big statistics, but we genuinely do have a culture of sort of slight understatement. we act first and talk later and you know it's it's good to know that we're making some progress.

This is ultimately what matters.

This year, 2025, Abu Dhabi Finance Week, we can't wait to get back there again.

I thank you.

What can we look forward to?

Talk about a little bit of the structure, what's going on.

So it starts on the first day of Finance Week.

It's kind of the informal day.

So that's the Sunday, which is the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, the Formula One, the last race of the season.

Talk about a cliffhanger.

It's always a cliffbanger and it's just incredible.

So that's day 1, day 2.

Which is our first official day of finance Week, is the is the thematic day for Abu Dhabi's economy.

So this is where we talk about our falcon economy, the growth of the economy, what is going on inside Abu Dhabi.

Day 3, which is the Tuesday, is the thematic day for asset management.

So all the big hedge fund bosses, private equity bosses, and sovereign wealth funds, family offices, etc.

Day 4 is the thematic day for tech.

Um, so that's the Wednesday, and then day 5, it's the final day, is the thematic day for sustainability, um, which just after COP 30 in Brazil, maybe a couple of weeks later, is a good time to talk about climate finance.

So that's kind of the structure of the week.

Everyone is welcome to come and join us, please.

I know that you're very welcome in Abu Dhabi, and we'd love to have you in our home and we'll see you at Abu Dhabi Finance.

Well, absolutely couldn't be more inviting and the hospitality is incredible.

I'm just leaving this visual with all of us when we think about engineering the capital network.

I just continue to have this super cluster of innovation in my mind and these nodes firing.

I can't wait to hear what we're going to hear the next thing about that in December.

Chris, thank you so much for joining us.

What a pleasure.

Thanks for having me, Vince.

Always.