NEW YORK: UBS, the world’s biggest wealth manager, on Tuesday named Iqbal Khan the sole head of the Swiss bank’s global wealth management division in an executive board reshuffle.
Khan, who joined Switzerland’s biggest bank in 2019 to co-head its flagship division, will take over when co-president Tom Naratil steps down in October after decades with the bank.
Naureen Hassan, the second-ranking officer at the New York Federal Reserve, replaces Naratil in his second role as president of UBS Americas, the bank said in a statement.
Under Chief Executive Ralph Hamers, UBS has sought to leverage technology and integrate fintech acquisitions to boost revenues, expand its client base and cut costs.
“Our Global Wealth Management business and our Americas region are strategically important, and both offer significant growth opportunities for us,” Hamers said in a statement.
Khan previously led smaller rival Credit Suisse’s international wealth management division. Khan was thrust into the spotlight after leaving Credit Suisse when he confronted a private detective who was following him and his wife.
That incident prompted a criminal complaint, multiple sackings and enforcement proceedings against Credit Suisse, where further spying cases emerged, prompting the CEO to quit.
Khan has kept a relatively low public profile since the spying incident, but sources familiar with UBS say he is popular with employees and clients and could be a CEO candidate.
When Khan joined UBS, it was seen as a bid to help the bank cope with sluggish activity among wealthy clients, ultra-low interest rates and increased competition from US rivals.
Under Khan and Naratil, UBS overhauled its wealth management business by cutting layers of middle management to give local teams more autonomy, expanding lending to ultra-wealthy clients and bulking up its digital offerings to attract more clients.
In 2021, UBS spent $1.4 billion to buy US-focused digital investing platform Wealthfront, which has more than $27 billion under management. It also rolled out a hybrid digital wealth management platform.
The wealth management division’s pre-tax profits were up 40 percent in 2021 compared with 2019. Since Khan joined, the division has brought in more than $50 billion in net new loans and more than $150 billion in fresh fee-generating client inflows.
UBS overall has delivered strong results in recent years, booking its best annual profit since the global financial crisis in 2021 and its best first-quarter net profit in 15 years at the start of 2022.
But inflation, rising interest rates, commodity shocks and the Ukraine war have hit financial markets and prompted many investors to become more risk averse and retreat from borrowing.
UBS is set to report second-quarter results on July 26.
Hassan, who will join the bank’s executive ranks in October, served as first vice president and chief operating officer at the New York Fed. She has also worked at Morgan Stanley.
Naratil, who has been with UBS since it acquired US brokerage Paine Webber in 2000, joined the executive board as chief financial officer in 2011 and then became chief operating officer. He headed wealth management in the Americas from 2016.
UBS promotes Iqbal Khan to steer wealth management
https://arab.news/4eysx
UBS promotes Iqbal Khan to steer wealth management
- Khan, who joined UBS in 2019 to co-head its flagship division, will take over when co-president Tom Naratil steps down in October
Saudi-built AI takes on financial crime
- Mozn’s FOCAL reflects the Kingdom’s growing fintech ambitions
RIYADH: As financial institutions face increasingly complex threats from fraud and money laundering, technology companies are racing to build systems that can keep pace with evolving risks.
One such effort is FOCAL, an AI-powered compliance and fraud prevention platform developed by Riyadh-based enterprise artificial intelligence company Mozn.
Founded in 2017, Mozn was established with a focus on building AI technology tailored to regional market needs and regulatory environments. Over time, the company has expanded its reach beyond Saudi Arabia, developing advanced AI solutions used by financial institutions in multiple markets. It has also gained international recognition, including being listed among the World’s Top 250 Fintech Companies for the second consecutive year.
In January 2026, Mozn’s flagship product, FOCAL, was named a Category Leader in Chartis Research’s RiskTech Quadrant 2025 for both AML Transaction Monitoring and KYC (Know Your Customer) Data and Solutions, placing it among 10 companies globally to receive this designation.
Malik Alyousef, co-founder of Mozn and chief technology officer of FOCAL, told Arab News that the platform initially focused on core anti-money laundering functions when development began in 2018. These included customer screening, watchlists, and transaction monitoring to support counter-terrorism financing efforts and the detection of suspicious activity.
As financial crime tactics evolved, the platform expanded into fraud prevention. According to Alyousef, this shift introduced a more proactive model, beginning with device risk analysis and later incorporating tools such as device fingerprinting, behavioral biometrics, and transaction fraud detection.
More recently, FOCAL has moved toward platform convergence through its Financial Crime Intelligence layer, a vendor-neutral framework designed to bring together multiple systems into a single interface for investigation and reporting. The approach allows institutions to gain a consolidated view without replacing their existing technology infrastructure.
“Our architecture eliminates blind spots in financial crime detection. It gives institutions a complete view of the user journey, combining transactional and non-transactional behavioral data,” Alyousef said.
DID YOU KNOW?
• Some electronic money institutions using the platform have reported fraud reductions of up to 90 percent.
• The platform combines anti-money laundering and fraud prevention into a single financial crime intelligence system.
• FOCAL integrates with existing banking systems without requiring institutions to replace their technology stack.
Beyond its underlying architecture, Alyousef pointed to several areas where FOCAL aims to differentiate itself in a competitive market. One is its emphasis on proactive fraud prevention, which assesses risk throughout the customer lifecycle — from onboarding and login behavior to ongoing account activity — with the goal of stopping fraud before losses occur.
He described the platform as an “expert-led model,” highlighting the availability of on-the-ground support for system design, tuning, assessments, and continuous optimization throughout its use.
“FOCAL is designed to be extended,” Alyousef added, noting its adaptability and the ability for clients to customize schemas, rules, and data fields to match their business models and risk tolerance. This flexibility, he said, allows institutions to respond more quickly to emerging fraud patterns.
Alyousef also emphasized the importance of local context in the platform’s development.
“The platform incorporates regional regulatory requirements and language considerations. Global tools often struggle with local context, naming conventions and compliance nuances — we are designed specifically with these realities in mind,” he said.
FOCAL is currently used by a range of organizations, including traditional banks, digital banks, fintech firms, electronic money institutions, payment companies, and other financial service providers. Alyousef said results from live deployments have been significant, with some large EMI clients reporting fraud reductions of up to 90 percent.
“Clients benefit not only from reduced fraud losses but also from an improved customer experience, as the system minimizes unnecessary friction and false rejections,” he said. “Beyond financial services, we also work with organizations in e-commerce and telecommunications.”
Looking ahead, Alyousef said the company sees agentic AI as a key direction for the future of financial crime prevention, both in the region and globally. Mozn, he added, is investing heavily in this area to enhance investigative workflows and operational efficiency, building on the capabilities of its Financial Crime Intelligence layer.
“We are pioneers in introducing agentic AI for financial crime investigation and rule-building. Our roadmap increasingly emphasizes automation, advanced machine learning and AI-assisted workflows to improve investigator productivity and reduce false positives.”
As AI tools become more widely available, Alyousef warned that the risk of misuse by criminals is also increasing, raising the bar for defensive technologies.
“Our goal is to stay ahead of that curve and to contribute meaningfully to positioning Saudi Arabia and the region as globally competitive leaders in AI,” he said.
