The war made the Gulf more attractive to Swiss quant house Finreon

Swiss quant house Finreon opened its representative office in the Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC) in April, at the height of the regional conflict. Like the many fund managers that kept pouring into the UAE, Finreon wasn’t deterred — if anything, its head of Middle East Nada Hassan (LinkedIn) says the region is “more attractive than ever before.”

Hassan, who grew up in Dubai and spent 15 years as a managing director at Credit Suisse and UBS before joining Finreon in September 2025, says the war overhauled what clients need: daily liquidity instead of just long-dated fixed income, EUR and CHF exposure alongside the USD, and products to hedge risk.

“There were different client needs from just two months before the conflict,” Hassan says. “What we learned we would have to relearn,” she adds. Three shifts stand out: clients began looking for products offering daily liquidity, as opposed to traditionally popular but more illiquid asset classes like real estate; more exposure to currencies other than the USD given the AED peg to the USD; and safe havens like gold became even more popular.

Finreon found its match: “Finreon is a risk manager at heart,” Hassan says. The St. Gallen University spin-off, which manages c. USD 7 bn, offers several products that have already piqued Gulf clients’ interest. Volatility Income uses options to earn income from volatility in global equity prices; Golden Income does the same with gold futures. The pitch to Gulf families is income on an asset they rarely sell. “We usually want to keep [gold] for our great, great, great grandchildren,” Hassan says. “But then we miss the [upside] of harvesting income from that gold.”

Another product garnering interest: Tail Risk Control, Finreon’s longest-running strategy, uses the firm’s patented signals to forecast market crashes and holds USD 2.4 bn of European money. Regional investors are asking whether it could be made shariah-compliant, Hassan tells us. The strategy has brought investors returns of some 13.2% YTD as of August, according to Finreon’s factsheet (pdf).

Besides the new attractions for a risk manager, Dubai’s “finance hub” status makes it more compelling. In Switzerland, Germany, Italy, and Austria, its clients are locals. In Dubai, they are Russian, French, Emirati, and everything in between — and each wants something different, Hassan tells us. “A Russian client in the UAE is not going to ask us for the same investment product a French or an Emirati is going to ask us for,” Hassan says. The office is also meant to be the firm’s gateway to the Gulf, as well as other countries in the region like Egypt, Jordan, and Syria.

SOUND SMART- All of this runs through an office that can’t manage money. A DFSA-licensed representative office can market its parent’s products in the DIFC, but can’t carry out financial services itself. The Dubai licence lets Hassan market Finreon’s funds; investment decisions and advice stay at head office in St. Gallen. Clients buy through their own banks using the fund’s ISIN, so the money never leaves their portfolio. The rep office is still reshaping what head office builds: Finreon is working on adapting one of its strategies to make it shariah-compliant — that would be a strategy designed around demand from the Gulf rather than from Europe.

The shariah-compliant strategy is still early. The firm is now lining up a shariah supervisory board, chosen on the recommendation of the clients asking for the fund. New Finreon funds need at least USD 5 mn in seed capital to get off the ground. Hassan says the fund could be ready by December, but that depends on approvals from the DFSA and the shariah board.

It’s for the Gulf, but it could travel. “We think this is the flagship product for the region,” Hassan says, while noting that she sees a market closer to head office, in Muslim residents of Geneva and Germany who aren’t offered shariah-compliant products today.

Looking ahead: An Abu Dhabi office and a bigger team are on the long-term list, but Hassan won’t put dates on them while “the region is actually changing as we speak.” Her own two-to-three-year test is whether Gulf investors start telling each other: “We have that need, why don't we ask Finreon?” And she expects the push to diversify to outlast the conflict. “The fundamentals will stay, but people will look for diversification.”