Noha Gad

In the investment management world, it is common for fund managers to earn a performance fee when they generate strong profits for their clients, but this arrangement can create an unfair situation if those gains are later lost and then partially recovered. Without additional safeguards, a manager could collect a performance fee during a good year, see the portfolio value drop sharply in the following year, and then earn another performance fee simply by bringing the fund back to its earlier level even though investors have not truly benefited from any new gains.

The high-water mark is a widely used rule in hedge funds and other managed investment products that prevents this outcome by linking performance fees to real, additional value creation rather than temporary swings in portfolio value. This rule sets the highest value that the fund has ever reached as a benchmark, allowing managers to charge a performance fee only on profits that rise above that previous peak.

What is meant by a high-water mark?

This term refers to the highest level that a body of water reaches, but metaphorically, it refers to the peak value of an investment fund or the highest point of achievement.

In the business realm, the high-water mark is a benchmark investment funds use to ensure investors only pay performance fees when a fund’s value reaches a new peak. It ensures that investors do not have to pay performance fees for poor performance, but, more importantly, guarantees that investors do not pay performance-based fees twice for the same amount of performance.

For asset management companies, including a high-water mark in their fee structure can be a strong signal of fairness and alignment with investors, ultimately contributing to attracting and retaining capital in a competitive market.

From a managerial perspective, the high-water mark encourages a focus on sustainable, long-term performance rather than short-term increases that might be followed by sharp declines. As performance fees are only available after the fund exceeds its highest historical value, managers have a clear incentive to avoid strategies that generate volatile returns with large drawdowns.

Why do high-water marks matter?

High-water marks are widely viewed as a key investor protection in hedge funds and other performance-fee-based investment structures, and they bring several clear advantages for both investors and fund managers. This includes:

• Protecting investors from paying twice for the same gains.
• Aligning manager incentives with genuine outperformance.
• Promoting more disciplined risk management.
• Supporting long-term thinking over short-term spikes.
• Enhancing trust and credibility with investors.
• Encouraging clearer communication about performance.

In conclusion, the high-water mark is more than a technical fee detail; it is a core element of fair and transparent performance-based compensation in investment management. Setting the fund’s highest historical value as the threshold for performance fees ensures that managers are rewarded only for creating new gains, not for recovering past losses or simply returning to earlier levels.

For investors, this structure provides a clear safeguard against paying twice for the same performance and helps align the manager’s interests with their own long-term outcomes. For managers and firms, it encourages more disciplined risk-taking, supports a focus on sustainable growth, and can strengthen trust and credibility in a competitive market.

By: Ahmed Rashad, Sr. AI Specialist, Middle East & Africa at Nutanix

Have you seen this film before? A new technology arrives, powerful and effortlessly accessible. Departments spin up projects with minimal oversight from IT or finance. The first efforts reproduce old ways of working, and then somebody rethinks the workflow entirely, and the pace picks up. Then the invoice arrives, and the organization discovers it must bring things under control without cutting off access, because access is now how the work gets done.

That was the cloud, twenty years ago. It is gen AI today, on fast forward. What took cloud most of a decade is taking enterprises about eighteen months.

We watch this from two seats. We run our own AI workloads on our own GPUs, so we have made these mistakes with our own money. We also sit alongside a great many organizations making them at the same time, in different industries and under different regulatory regimes. The striking thing is how little the story varies.

Everyone’s first question is the wrong one

It is almost always “which model?”, and it is the question that matters least, because the answer changes every quarter.

The question that survives contact with production is what a unit of work costs. Not cost per token, but cost per resolved support ticket, per merged pull request, per document retrieved. The unit price keeps falling while total spend keeps climbing, because cheaper inference simply means more inference. Jevons would have recognized it immediately.

The same discipline applies to the benefit side. Where organizations measure carefully, the gains tend to land in a recognizable range: on the order of 10 to 15 percent for support teams, and 20 to 25 percent in feature delivery velocity for engineering teams. Those numbers are only worth quoting when they have been instrumented beforehand, against a baseline captured before deployment. Worth knowing: a randomized trial by METR found that experienced developers completed real tasks 19 percent slower with AI tools, while believing they had been 20 percent faster. If you cannot say how you measured, you have a feeling rather than a result.

Agents are not chatbots, and they do not fail like chatbots

This is the shift most organizations are unprepared for. A person using an assistant makes a request and receives an answer, and both the cost and the blast radius are bounded by their attention. An agent decides for itself how many steps to take, which systems to touch, and what to do with whatever it finds. The same instruction on a different day produces a different number of tool calls, a different bill, and a different set of side effects.

Which means the controls that work are the ones you would apply to a new joiner with production access, not the ones you would apply to software licenses. An identity for every agent, distinct from the human who launched it. Permissions scoped to each tool and each system, because MCP support is table stakes now, but speaking MCP and letting you grant

an agent read access there and write access nowhere are very different things. Budget ceilings that are enforced rather than alerted on. Traces detailed enough to reconstruct why an agent took eleven steps rather than three. And a human gate on anything irreversible.

The organizations getting this right have arrived at the same architectural conclusion independently. Those decisions cannot live inside each application. They belong at a single point that every agent’s requests pass through, so that policy, spend and audit are answered once for the whole estate rather than reimplemented project by project.

Running inference in production is a different discipline from running a pilot

A demo needs one model to work once. Production needs many models to work continuously, at predictable cost, while the field moves underneath you. Every organization we work with has replaced a model in production faster than it expected to, whether because of a cheaper open weight release, a regulatory constraint, or a change in vendor pricing. The ones who suffered were those who had welded a specific model to a specific location and a specific set of applications.

Flexibility here is not a luxury; it is the whole game: serving different models for different tasks, sizing endpoints to demand, and sharing GPUs across workloads through partitioning and scheduling rather than dedicating them. And, unfashionably, batch. Document classification, index rebuilds and evaluation runs do not care whether they complete at 14:00 or at 04:00. Defer them, and interactive workloads get the daytime capacity they need. Banks ran on this logic throughout the mainframe era. It was never wrong. It merely stopped being necessary when compute was cheap.

Location is becoming a variable, not a decision

Public cloud wins on speed and on access to the newest hardware. Other forces push the opposite way. Data residency and sovereignty requirements are no longer a compliance checkbox to be satisfied at the end of a project. For a growing number of organizations, they determine which workloads can exist at all, and where. Add data gravity, latency to customers, and the economics of sustained utilization, and owned or collocated infrastructure starts to look like the sensible home for a meaningful share of inference.

Meanwhile, a new class of specialized GPU providers has appeared, and some of the organizations we work with are becoming those providers themselves, turning regional advantage and spare capacity into a business of their own.

Nobody gets this allocation right at the first attempt. What matters is that getting it wrong stays cheap to correct: that a workload can move between owned, rented and regional infrastructure without being rewritten, and that governance follows it when it moves.

Do not build a walled garden

The temptation is to stand AI up as a separate estate, with its own tooling, its own rules and its own team, deliberately quarantined from everything else. There are two problems with that.

The first is that agents produce nothing of value until they can reach the systems and the data where your business actually runs. A wall built for safety very often becomes the reason a promising pilot never becomes production. The capability works. It simply is not allowed near anything that matters.

The second is the arithmetic of running everything twice. Two sets of policies, two audit trails, two places to look during an incident, and two opportunities for them to contradict each other, while the people who understand your controls best sit on the far side of the wall from the workloads that need them most.

The organizations moving fastest treat AI as a workload like any other, subject to the same access model, the same operational discipline and the same teams, with the controls that are specific to AI layered on top rather than rebuilt alongside.

Where that leaves us

There is no magic bullet for a technology moving this fast, and anyone selling one is selling something else. But the discipline transfers even when the tools do not. Measure cost per unit of work. Instrument your claims before you repeat them. Give agents identities, budgets and boundaries, enforced in one place. Keep models and workloads free to move. And govern all of it with your estate rather than beside it.

The film is on fast forward, and none of us gets to slow it down. But you can learn the genre well enough to see the twists coming, and avoid being the character who loses the plot.

Ghada Ismail

Starting a company usually means dealing with uncertainty from day one. There is no guaranteed market, no perfect product, and often no clear answer to what comes next. This is exactly where an Entrepreneur-in-Residence (EIR) can make a difference.

An EIR is an experienced entrepreneur who temporarily joins an organization such as a venture capital firm, accelerator, incubator, university, or large company. The idea is fairly simple: bring someone with real experience of building businesses into an environment where new ideas are being explored.

But an EIR is not just another adviser sitting in meetings and giving founders advice. Depending on the organization, they may be expected to find a business opportunity, test an idea, work with startups, build a product, or even create a new company.

So, What Does an EIR Actually Do?

There is no single job description for an Entrepreneur-in-Residence. The role can look very different from one organization to another.

At a venture capital firm, an EIR might spend time looking at new markets and technologies, meeting founders, helping portfolio companies, or developing a startup idea that the firm believes could have potential.

In other cases, the EIR may already have an idea. The organization provides access to its network, resources, funding, or expertise while the entrepreneur works on turning that idea into something viable.

EIR vs. Consultant: What’s the Difference?

The two roles can sound similar, but there is an important distinction. A consultant is usually brought in to solve a specific problem. They analyze the situation, provide recommendations, and move on to the next project. An EIR is generally much closer to the building process. They might spot an opportunity, test whether customers actually want the product, find potential co-founders, develop an early version of the business, and eventually launch it.

In other words, a consultant is often paid to advise, while an EIR may be expected to build.

Why Are Venture Capital Firms Interested in EIRs?

For VC firms, an EIR can be a way to create opportunities rather than simply wait for founders to walk through the door.

Experienced entrepreneurs often know how to recognize problems worth solving. They also understand what it takes to turn an early idea into a company. By bringing these people into the firm, investors can explore new sectors and business models from the inside.

There is another advantage: relationships.

An experienced entrepreneur usually brings a network of founders, engineers, executives, investors, and industry specialists. That network can be valuable when an idea starts moving from the whiteboard to the real world.

What Makes a Good EIR?

Being a successful founder is helpful, but it is not enough.

A good EIR needs to be comfortable with uncertainty. They need to know how to ask the right questions, test assumptions quickly, and recognize when an idea is not working.

Curiosity is just as important as experience. Markets change, technologies evolve, and what worked for a previous startup may not work for the next one.

Most importantly, an EIR needs to be willing to get their hands dirty. Building a company involves far more than having a good idea. It means speaking to customers, testing products, recruiting people, changing direction, and sometimes starting over.

To Wrap Things Up…

An Entrepreneur-in-Residence is essentially an experienced builder given the time, space, and resources to explore what could come next. For investors and organizations, it can be a way to uncover new opportunities while bringing entrepreneurial experience closer to the decision-making process. For entrepreneurs, it offers a chance to explore their next move without having to start entirely from zero.

As startup ecosystems become more sophisticated, the EIR model offers an interesting middle ground between building, investing, and exploring.

Noha Gad

High Net Worth Individuals (HNWIs) occupy a unique space in the financial ecosystem, sitting at the intersection of private wealth and public consequence. Yet, for all their visibility in luxury markets and investment circles, their decision-making processes remain widely misunderstood. Today's HNWIs are navigating a world of increased regulatory scrutiny, shifting family dynamics, and a growing expectation to use their resources deliberately.

For many high-net-worth individuals, the central question changes once wealth has been created. Instead of focusing only on earning more, they must decide how to protect capital, diversify investments, manage risk, maintain liquidity, and pass wealth on responsibly. For example, a successful entrepreneur who has sold a business may suddenly move from having most of their wealth tied to one company to managing a large pool of investable assets. That transition requires a very different mindset, one centered on long-term planning rather than short-term growth alone.

Who is a high-net-worth individual?

A high-net-worth individual is someone with liquid assets of at least $1 million in investable or liquid assets, excluding their primary residence. Liquid assets held by HNWIs include cash and investments that can be easily liquidated or converted to cash, including stocks. These individuals need and receive tailored financial and money management services due to their net worth.

HNWI individuals may demand and can justify personalized investment management, estate planning, and tax planning services. They generally qualify for separately managed investment accounts rather than mutual funds.

These individuals may get various benefits from financial institutions. For instance, they may qualify for banking, investment, and other financial services with reduced fees, discounts, and special rates, in addition to access to special events and perks.

How do HNWIs invest?

High-net-worth individuals do not necessarily invest according to an entirely different set of financial principles. Diversification, risk management, liquidity, and long-term discipline remain important for every investor; however, the size and structure of their wealth often give HNWIs access to a broader range of opportunities.

HNWIs’ portfolios may need to support a business, preserve family wealth, generate recurring income, fund philanthropic goals, and prepare for the transfer of assets to future generations. Accordingly, investment strategy becomes less about selecting a single high-performing asset and more about building a resilient system of assets that work together.

Many HNWIs hold a core portfolio of traditional investments, including public equities, bonds, cash, and real estate. However, wealthy investors may also allocate part of their capital to private-market opportunities that are less accessible to the average investor. This includes private equity investments in established, non-listed companies; venture capital investments in startups and high-growth businesses; commercial real estate and development projects; hedge funds; and more.

Types of High-Net-Worth Individuals 

HNWIs can be divided into several different categories. Where they fall depends on how much they are worth:

• Sub-HNWI: An individual with more than $100,000 but less than $1 million
• Very-HNWI: An individual whose net worth is at least $1 million
• Mid-Tier HNWI or Mid-Tier Millionaire: An individual whose net worth is between $5 million and $30 million in investable assets.
• Ultra-HNWI: An individual who holds $30 million or more in investable assets and sits at the highest end of the standard HNWI classification framework.

Finally, the wealth of high-net-worth individuals can provide access to specialized investment opportunities, private-banking services, and sophisticated financial structures; however, it brings greater responsibility. Managing substantial wealth requires more than identifying attractive investments; it demands a clear strategy for preserving capital, maintaining liquidity, reducing concentration risk, and preparing for uncertainty.

For HNWIs, the financial journey often changes after wealth has been created. Over time, protecting that wealth becomes just as important as growing it. This often involves diversifying across asset classes and geographies, balancing liquid and long-term investments, and seeking professional support in areas such as estate planning, tax coordination, and family governance.

Ghada Ismail

Saudi Arabia’s long-established relationship with precious metals is entering a new digital phase. As financial technology reshapes the way consumers save, invest, and manage wealth, gold is increasingly moving beyond traditional jewelry markets and physical bullion transactions into digital platforms and banking channels.

The emergence of digital gold services is creating a new intersection between fintech, wealth management, and precious-metals markets. Consumers can increasingly purchase gold digitally, track their holdings, automate savings, and, in some cases, convert digital ownership into physical metal. At the same time, the expansion of these services from fintech startups to major Saudi banks suggests that digital precious-metals investing is evolving from a niche proposition into a broader financial-services category.

The concept behind digital gold is relatively straightforward. Instead of requiring consumers to purchase and physically store a gold bar, digital platforms allow them to acquire ownership of gold while managing their holdings through a mobile application or digital banking platform.

This can lower the traditional barriers associated with precious-metals investment, particularly for consumers who may want to build their holdings gradually rather than make a large one-time purchase.

Startups adopting digital gold trading

GrowK is one example of this model in Saudi Arabia. The platform allows users to save in 24-karat digital gold, with automated savings options that can be structured on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. It also allows users to buy, sell, and monitor their gold holdings digitally.

The significance of such a model goes beyond convenience. By introducing automated and recurring purchases, platforms can transform gold from an asset typically purchased periodically into a digital savings product.

This is where the model begins to resemble fintech.

Rather than simply digitizing the traditional gold-buying process, digital platforms can introduce features that are familiar from modern financial applications, including automated saving, portfolio monitoring, real-time pricing, and fractional ownership.

Banks are validating the model

The development is not limited to startups.

Saudi Arabia’s established banking sector is also incorporating precious metals into its digital financial services, potentially giving the category a much broader consumer reach.

SNB’s Gold Account enables customers to buy and sell investment-grade gold through the bank’s digital channels, including SNB Mobile and AlAhliOnline. The bank states that its gold is 999.9 purity and provides customers with the option of requesting physical gold bars through selected branches.

The model effectively combines digital access with physical ownership. Customers can manage their gold electronically while retaining a pathway to physical bullion.

Al Rajhi Bank’s Gold Wallet follows a similar approach, allowing customers to buy, sell, and store gold digitally while monitoring gold prices and managing their holdings through the bank’s digital ecosystem.

The involvement of major banks is significant because it moves digital gold beyond the realm of specialist investment applications.

When precious metals become integrated into mainstream digital banking, consumers can potentially view gold alongside their other financial products rather than as a separate physical asset requiring a visit to a jeweler or bullion dealer.

The infrastructure opportunity

While consumer-facing applications are attracting attention, another part of the market is developing behind the scenes.

Nexus Global’s Mithqal is designed as infrastructure for banks, fintech companies, wealth managers, and other institutions seeking to offer digital precious-metals products.

The platform provides capabilities related to digital gold accounts, metal wallets, pricing, trading, physical allocation, custody, settlement, and reporting. Its offering also extends beyond gold to other precious metals, including silver and platinum.

This infrastructure layer could become particularly important as demand grows.

Rather than every financial institution building its own technology and operational infrastructure for precious-metals products, platforms such as Mithqal can potentially provide the underlying technology needed to bring these services to market.

This mirrors developments elsewhere in fintech.

Payments infrastructure enabled companies to build digital wallets and payment applications without developing payment rails from scratch. Banking infrastructure has similarly allowed fintech companies to launch financial products without building a complete banking system.

Precious-metals infrastructure could play a comparable role, creating the technological rails for a broader digital bullion ecosystem.

Why gold, and why now?

Saudi Arabia has a particularly strong foundation for this market because gold already occupies an important position in the country’s consumer and investment culture.

The World Gold Council reported that Saudi Arabia’s bar and coin investment demand increased from 15.5 tons in 2024 to 17.5 tons in 2025, representing a 13% increase. Saudi Arabia was also the largest bar and coin investment market in the GCC during 2025.

At the same time, jewelry demand declined. Saudi jewelry consumption fell 10% to 44 tons in 2025, while its value declined 28% to $8.9 billion, according to the World Gold Council.

The shift is important because it suggests that high gold prices may be changing how consumers approach the metal.

Rather than purchasing gold primarily as jewelry, some consumers may increasingly view it through an investment lens.

Digital platforms are well positioned to serve this behavior because they can make smaller purchases more accessible.

The same consumer who may find a large physical gold purchase expensive can potentially accumulate smaller quantities over time.

Silver could expand the opportunity

Gold is likely to remain the primary asset in the digital precious-metals market, but silver could provide the next stage of growth.

Silver has a different investment profile from gold. Alongside its role as a precious metal, it has significant industrial applications, including electronics, solar technology, and manufacturing.

That gives digital platforms an opportunity to move beyond single-asset products toward multi-metal investment portfolios.

A consumer could eventually use one application to allocate a monthly amount between gold and silver, monitor the performance of both assets, and potentially redeem holdings physically.

This would represent a significant evolution from the concept of a digital gold wallet.

It would become a digital precious-metals portfolio, combining the accessibility of fintech with the characteristics of physical commodities.

Trust will determine the winners

Despite the opportunity, digital precious-metals platforms face a fundamental challenge, which is trust.

When a customer sees one gram of gold displayed in an application, they need to know exactly what that balance represents.

Is the gold physically allocated? Where is it stored? Who is responsible for custody? Is the inventory independently verified? Can the customer redeem the gold? What are the transaction spreads, storage fees, and withdrawal costs?

These questions become particularly important as the market expands beyond established banks and into startups and specialist platforms.

Regulatory clarity will also matter.

The distinction between a platform facilitating the purchase and custody of physical precious metals and one offering investment products or regulated capital-market activities can be significant.

For companies operating in this space, regulatory compliance could therefore become a competitive advantage rather than simply a legal requirement.

The strongest platforms will likely be those that combine technology with transparent ownership structures, credible custody arrangements, clear pricing, robust compliance, and reliable physical redemption mechanisms.

Is digital gold the new fintech?

The answer depends on how “new fintech” is defined.

Digital precious metals are unlikely to replace the established pillars of Saudi fintech, such as payments, lending, insurance, and financial infrastructure.

But they could represent something equally important: the next stage of Saudi wealthtech.

The Kingdom’s fintech market is gradually moving beyond simply making financial transactions digital toward helping consumers save, invest, and manage their wealth through technology.

Gold provides an unusual advantage in this transition.

Unlike many emerging financial products, it does not require consumers to understand an entirely new asset. Gold is already familiar. The innovation lies in changing how consumers access, accumulate, manage, and potentially redeem it.

The four Saudi examples illustrate the different layers of this emerging ecosystem. Together, they suggest that digital precious metals are developing into something broader than a collection of investment apps.

The next opportunity could be the creation of a fully integrated digital commodities ecosystem in which consumers can save in gold, diversify into silver, automate purchases, monitor portfolios, and access physical assets through a single digital experience.

For Saudi Arabia, the opportunity is particularly compelling because the digital future is being built around an asset with a very long history.

Gold may be one of the oldest stores of wealth, but the way Saudi consumers own it could be entering a distinctly digital era.