Anyone could post stock tips or crypto picks to thousands of followers, with no rules and no accountability. In 2025, the UAE became the first country in the Middle East to require financial influencers to be licensed.
The dilemma
Social media had created a new kind of financial adviser: the financial influencer, or finfluencer. These are individuals who post investment tips, stock picks, and cryptocurrency recommendations to large followings on platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. In the UAE, this was happening with no oversight at all. A finfluencer could recommend a risky product, hide a paid promotion, or run a pump-and-dump scheme, where someone talks up an asset they own and then sells once followers have pushed the price up. Their followers had no way of knowing whether the advice was honest, qualified, or paid for. The regulator faced a now-familiar choice: write rules for an activity that had grown up entirely outside regulation, or leave retail investors exposed to advice that no one was accountable for.
The regulatory gap
There was no legal framework covering people who give financial advice through social media. Licensed financial advisers had to meet professional standards, disclose conflicts of interest, and answer to a regulator. Finfluencers giving similar advice to far larger audiences had to do none of these things. What was needed was a way to hold finfluencers to comparable standards of honesty and transparency, without shutting down a legitimate and growing form of financial communication.
The approach
In May 2025, the UAE's Securities and Commodities Authority issued Chairman's Resolution No. 10 of 2025, creating the first licensing system for financial influencers in the Middle East. The rules took effect almost immediately after being issued. Under the system, anyone who provides financial recommendations in the UAE, whether about local or foreign products, virtual assets, or financial services, must register with the regulator. To get a licence, applicants have to show their qualifications, disclose any conflicts of interest, and make clear when content is paid for. Licences must be renewed each year. The approach is a hybrid. It sets specific requirements, such as mandatory registration and clear disclosure, but leaves finfluencers free to choose how they communicate, whether through social media posts, blogs, or seminars. The framework was shaped by two public workshops, one open to the public and one for financial advisory firms, and was designed to line up with international standards, in particular the global standard-setter IOSCO, which published its own report on finfluencers in May 2025.
Results achieved
In its first months, the regulator licensed 104 finfluencers and rejected 18 applications from people who did not meet the standard to give financial advice. Enforcement has also begun. One finfluencer was fined 10,000 dirhams for breaching the new rules. Another was referred to the public prosecutor for publishing financial analysis and recommendations on foreign exchange and virtual currencies through YouTube and other platforms in breach of the regulations.
Two limits are worth noting. The system is new, so there is not yet evidence on whether licensing actually reduces the harm to investors that prompted it, or simply moves unlicensed advice to platforms and accounts that are harder to monitor. And the regime applies to the UAE mainland. Financial free zones such as the Dubai International Financial Centre are not directly covered, though they have their own overlapping conduct rules.
The transferable lesson
Financial regulation has traditionally focused on firms and licensed professionals. The rise of finfluencers shows how financial advice can reach millions of people through channels that sit completely outside that perimeter. The UAE's response is an early example of extending familiar regulatory tools, registration, disclosure, and the threat of enforcement, to a new type of actor.
