TEL AVIV, Israel – An investment group led by Abu Dhabi’s government-owned ADQ fund called off a proposed deal to buy control of Phoenix Holdings, Israel’s biggest insurer, citing regulatory issues.

In a report to the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange early Sunday, Phoenix said the draft agreement it filed with the ADQ consortium in December was terminated. The deal was one of the largest between companies in the United Arab Emirates and Israel since the two countries normalized relations almost three years ago under the U.S.-backed Abraham Accords.

“The parties have come to a mutual understanding regarding termination of the term sheet… in light of the potential regulatory limitations that would have arisen from the acquisition of the controlling stake by the consortium resulting in potential restrictions for several members of the consortium to undertake additional material investments in Israel,” the Phoenix statement said.

ADQ, the third-largest Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund with close to $160 billion in assets under management, offered as much as $675 million for a stake of 25-30% in Phoenix in negotiations with the Israeli company’s controlling U.S. shareholders, Centerbridge Partners and Gallatin Point Capital.

The UAE and Israel signed a free-trade agreement last year that the two countries predict will generate $10 billion in annual bilateral economic activity by 2026. Mubadala, another Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund, bought a 22% stake in an offshore Israeli natural gas field two years ago for $1.1 billion.

Abu Dhabi’s G42, a government-owned defense and technology company, launched joint firm last month with Viola Ventures, Israel’s largest private investor in tech firms, aiming to provide computer engineers and other skilled employees to businesses around the world.

While the Abraham Accords, which also included Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan, generated excitement for a new era of Middle East trade – bringing some half a million Israelis to visit the UAE for tourism and exploration of business opportunities – some of the enthusiasm has cooled.

UAE officials have said they are committed for the long term to normalization with Israel, even as the government has publicly criticized Israel’s handling of clashes with the Palestinians. Most recently, the UAE condemned the entry of Israeli forces into Jenin last month, the biggest West Bank military operation in 20 years, in which 12 Palestinians and an Israeli were killed.

With less than five months until the COP28 environmental summit opens in Dubai, the event’s Emirati leader, Sultan Al Jaber, pledged to confront the world’s slow response to global warming.

Speaking in Brussels on Thursday, Al Jaber, president-designate of the United Nations climate change conference that will be hosted by the UAE, said more pressure will be applied on governments to accelerate reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. He also laid out the schedule for the two-week event that opens Nov. 30 and will include the participation of some 200 countries.

“We must be brutally honest about the gaps that need to be filled, the root causes and how we got to this place here today,” Jaber told climate ministers and senior officials from the European Union, the U.S., China and other G20 countries. “Then we must apply a far-reaching, forward-looking, action-oriented and comprehensive response to address these gaps practically.”

Jaber, who is also head of the state-owned Abu Dhabi National Oil Company and UAE minister of industry and advanced technology, said delegates at the conference will engage in a “global stocktake” that will indicate how far their countries lag behind goals for reduced fossil fuel use and making the transition to renewable energy production.

The stocktake exercise addresses the recognition that the current pace of replacing carbon-based fuels is insufficient to meet the target set in the U.N.’s 2015 Paris Agreement that would try to limit global warming to 1.5 Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) from preindustrial levels.

“Today I am calling on all of us to disrupt business as usual, unite around decisive action and achieve game-changing results,” he said. “We need to challenge old models that were built for the last century. We need to break down silos that are slowing progress. And we need to bridge divides that are blocking critical breakthroughs.”

Some members of Congress and European legislators have attacked the choice of Al Jaber to preside over COP28 given his company’s prominence in the fossil fuel industry. The appointment was defended by John Kerry, the White House special envoy for climate, who said Al Jaber’s connection to the industry and his role in the UAE government will make the conference more effective. Al Jaber said in Brussels that he will arrange meetings between heads of the major oil companies, government leaders, the U.N. and international energy agencies. 

Al Jaber, who serves as chairman of Masdar, the UAE’s alternative fuel company,  called for a tripling of the world’s renewable energy capacity by 2030 and a doubling of energy efficiency. He said all governments are being encouraged to update their emissions-cutting targets by September. The UAE’s climate ministry last month said it planned a 40% reduction in carbon emissions by 2030, raising its previous goal of 31%.

In response to growing complaints about the costs of energy transition, Al Jaber called on international financial institutions to provide more funds to help poorer countries address climate change.

He said the conference would be built around four pillars: “Fast-tracking the energy transition, fixing climate finance, focusing on lives and livelihoods, and making COP28 fully inclusive.”

Nearly three years after establishing diplomatic ties, representatives from a group of Arab countries and Israel met this week in Bahrain to brainstorm ideas about forming a regional free-trade alliance.

The discussions were unofficial and meant to lay the groundwork for future negotiations among the countries that normalized relations with Israel under the 2020 Abraham Accords. The talks were organized by the Atlantic Council, a Washington think tank, as part of the backchannel “N7 Initiative” it developed in partnership with the New York-based Jeffrey M. Talpins Foundation to bolster the Accords.

“We brought senior trade negotiators together for a private discussion… to do a road map for a multilateral, regional free-trade agreement,” William F. Wechsler, senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Middle East programs and head of the N7 project, told The Circuit.

Taking part in the talks on Monday and Tuesday were trade officials from Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Morocco and Israel, Wechsler said, as well as former officials from Egypt and Sudan. Jordan did not participate. The N7 brand refers to Israel and the six Arab countries that have signed peace treaties or normalization pacts with it. Under the rules of the conference, none of the trade negotiators’ names could be made public.

The back-channel talks provided an opportunity for government representatives to discuss concrete steps for advancing normalization face-to-face at a time when such encounters have become less frequent. A meeting of the U.S.-backed Negev Forum, comprising the foreign ministers of the seven countries, has been repeatedly postponed this year amid violent eruptions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that have been strongly condemned by the Arab countries in the N7.

The trade conference was the third in a series of N7 events aimed at generating ideas for specific areas of Arab-Israel cooperation that will be presented for consideration by the Negev Forum. It followed a March meeting in the UAE on agriculture, water and food security, and December talks in Morocco on education and coexistence.

Increasing the potential impact of the N7 project is the fact that it was directed until last month by Daniel Shapiro, the former U.S. ambassador to Israel. Shapiro was appointed on June 29 to be the State Department’s senior advisor on regional integration. In his announcement, Secretary of State Tony Blinken said Shapiro’s task was to help “deepen and broaden the Abraham Accords, and build the Negev Forum.”

The UAE and Israel signed a free-trade agreement last year that the two countries predict will generate $10 billion in annual bilateral economic activity by 2026. Bahrain has indicated it is also close to signing a free-trade agreement with Israel. Wechsler said that a regional agreement would bring extra benefits because “as you add countries, it has a multiplier effect on free trade.”

While the trade negotiators went unidentified at the conference, the participating nations sent senior officials to observe the discussions and join an opening dinner at the Sofitel Hotel in Bahrain’s capital city of Manama. Among them were Abdelouahed Rahal, director general of the trade division at Morocco’s Ministry of Industry and Trade; Shaikh Abdulla bin Ahmed Al Khalifa, undersecretary for political affairs at Bahrain’s Foreign Ministry; Israel’s ambassador to Bahrain, Eitan Naeh; and the U.S. ambassador to Bahrain, Steven Bondy.

In a bid to strengthen normalization efforts across the Middle East and North Africa, Morocco, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Israel are promoting business ties among women.

The most recent joint activity was a three-day conference in May that took place in Marrakesh, Morocco, and drew nearly 100 female business leaders. Besides networking, the gathering explored women’s access to education, financial security and opportunities for leadership. In a series of panel discussions and workshops, the conference focused on investments, corporate funding and infrastructure development. Participants also discussed shared challenges for women in the Middle East and Africa and the impact of geography, culture and religion.

The conference was organized by Start-Up Nation Central, a nonprofit organization  that promotes Israeli tech companies, and Morocco’s Consensus Public Relations firm. 

Among the participants were women from Bahrain, Benin, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Kenya, Morocco, Nigeria, South Africa, Sudan, United Arab Emirates and the U.S., organizers said.

“What we were hearing often is that these women, particularly in the countries that we targeted, are often alone around decision-making tables,” Aviva Steinberger, SNC’s director of innovation diplomacy, told The Circuit. “The goals of this event were to connect these women at a professional level and at a personal level.”

The conference, which was titled “Women Connect to Innovate,” was supported by a range of companies and organizations including Google, Women in Tech, Morocco’s Foundation for Research, Development and Innovation in Science and Engineering and the Mohammed VI Polytechnic University.

Among the participants from Israel was Justine Zwerling, who heads the Middle East branch of Shore Capital Markets and was a founding member of the Gulf-Israel Women’s Forum. Morocco’s minister of solidarity and social integration, Aawatif Hayar, hosted a dinner for the conference. While the workshops were going on, three artists from Morocco, Israel and Senegal created a graffiti wall dedicated to women’s solidarity and international cooperation.

The event followed up on a larger conference organized last year by SNC that focused on developing ties between Moroccan and Israeli technology startups, particularly those addressing health, agriculture and climate technologies.

During the 2022 conference, companies and organizations from the two countries signed 13 memorandums of understanding: Israel’s Watergen, whose technology extracts water from air, signed a distribution deal with Morocco’s Waman Solutions; Israel’s Mehadrin formed a partnership with Adolam under the name “Global Farming Morocco” to grow and export avocados; and Israel’s Alma Lasers signed with Casablanca-based Guess Clinic to bring Alma’s aesthetic surgery devices to the Moroccan market.

Israel and Morocco maintained low-key business and diplomatic ties for years until agreeing to normalize relations under the Abraham Accords in December 2020. Many Israelis come from Moroccan descent and are estimated to number close to 1 million. André Azoulay, a prominent Jewish businessman in Morocco and senior adviser to King Mohammed VI, presented SNC with an award for its contributions to technological cooperation between the two countries.

AllianceBernstein, one of the largest U.S. asset managers, plans to open a regional office in the United Arab Emirates to tap into the rising tide of investments flowing through the Gulf.

The Nashville, Tenn.-based firm, which has $676 billion in assets under management, said last week that it received a regulatory license to operate in the Dubai International Financial Centre, a special economic zone within the UAE’s largest city. More than 300 asset- and wealth-management firms have offices in the DIFC.

The new office will be led by Jean-Paul Hobeika, managing director for Middle East institutions, who was named senior executive officer, AllianceBernstein said. He will work with Eduard van Nes, head of intermediary sales for the Middle East and Africa, who recently moved to Dubai. The firm, which employs 3,000 people at 45 offices around the world, has an Israeli branch in Tel Aviv.

Setting up in the UAE will spur AllianceBernstein’s regional growth and “improve our ability to serve clients through proximity as well as capturing important market opportunities,” said Willem van Gijzen, head of Central Europe, Middle East and Africa institutions at the firm. The new office will target institutional clients, distribution partners and family offices with its asset management services, the firm said.

A proliferation of mergers and acquisitions across the Gulf, as well as the inflow of money from Russians relocating because of international sanctions have bolstered financial and property markets in the UAE. The country’s sovereign wealth funds now manage more than $1.5 trillion in assets.

Capital inflow to the UAE rose by 10% last year to $23 billion, according to government records. Investment banks and asset management firms have also been opening new offices in Saudi Arabia, which has made establishing local branches a prerequisite for government business. The World Bank raised its growth forecast for the UAE to 3.4% from 1.1%, based on higher oil output, recent economic reforms and new investments.

Arif Amiri, CEO of the DIFC Authority, said AllianceBernstein’s “commitment to the region is testament to Dubai’s strategic position at the center of the world, providing the firm with access to $8 trillion of private wealth across the Middle East, Africa and South Asia.” The DIFC said in February that some 50 international hedge funds have applied for licenses to open in its independently regulated district.

TEL AVIV, Israel – Israel’s tech industry is lagging behind the U.S. and Europe in attracting venture capital amid breakthroughs in artificial intelligence that are generating renewed investment in startups, according to three new reports.

Companies in Israel raised $3.7 billion in the first six months of 2023 – the lowest amount of technology investment at the midyear point since 2018, according to a survey by the Start-Up Nation Policy Institute. That represents a 68% drop in financing from the same period last year.

Drilling down further, a report by the IVC research center, an industry group, and Bank Leumi’s LeumiTech unit indicated that the 100 fundraising deals recorded in the second quarter of 2023 represented a 48% decline from the corresponding period last year. Second-quarter funding was down 65% from the same quarter in 2022.

The SNPI report suggested that perceptions of instability in Israel stemming from government efforts to overhaul the judicial system and widespread protests against the proposals continue to chill investment.

“We are concerned that local unrest could cut off Israel’s high-tech industry from the global technology sector’s recovery, making it less competitive during this crucial time,“  the policy institute said.

The government’s Israel Innovation Authority added its own note of caution in a midyear report, citing a recovery by technology stocks in the U.S. that has not included Israeli companies. The Nasdaq 100 technology sector index rose 23.7% in the first quarter, compared to Israeli companies on the Nasdaq that increased only 10.8%.

“In light of the increase in the NASDAQ since the beginning of the year, the normal expectation would have been for an increase in fundraising and employee recruitment in Israel already during the summer months of 2023,” the government report said. “However, according to indicators presented so far, and which are reinforced by data for April and May, there is a genuine concern that Israeli high-tech will become detached from global trends.”

Israel’s success in spawning technology companies was enshrined in a 2009 book by Saul Singer and Dan Senor called Start-Up Nation. Technology has anchored Israel’s economy for the past three decades, now accounting for 15% of GDP, 50% of exports and 25% of tax income.

Tech company founders have been among the leaders of the protest movement against the proposed judicial measures, arguing that foreign funds are afraid their investments won’t be safe in Israel if the court system is the government controls the courts.

Moody’s Investors Service downgraded the country’s credit outlook in May from positive to stable, citing a “deterioration of Israel’s governance.” A month later Standard & Poor’s maintained its ratings for Israel after Netanyahu slowed down the judicial overhaul and said it would be moderated to reflect public concerns with the legislation.

TEL AVIV, Israel – Fighting computer crime together has helped reinforce ties between the United Arab Emirates and Israel since they signed a normalization agreement almost three years ago, the UAE’s head of cybersecurity, Mohamed Al Kuwaiti said.

Visiting Tel Aviv last week for the annual Cyber Week conference, Al Kuwait introduced the “Crystal Ball” project, a digital platform for detecting and repelling computer attacks. Microsoft, Israel’s Rafael Advanced Defense Systems and Abu Dhabi-based CPX are providing the technological backbone, and an unspecified number of countries will also participate.

“Cyberthreats do not distinguish between nations, do not distinguish between entities or people,” Al Kuwaiti said on Tuesday at Tel Aviv University gathering. “That is why we need to unite against those threats, and the Crystal Ball, that we are aiming for the whole community, will be the first step toward that.”

Al Kuwaiti, who met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday as part of a group of national cyber directors attending the conference, said the platform will enable partner countries to “easily and seamlessly share information.” The collaborative international effort will be strengthened by the combination of abilities, processing power and volume of data, he said.

The mission is to “design, deploy and enable regional intelligence enhancement” through collaboration and knowledge-sharing to combat national-level cyberthreats, according to a slide Al Kuwaiti showed during his presentation. He said the value of cooperation between the two countries was demonstrated recently when they worked together to ward off a DDOS (distributed denial of service) attack on their networks.

The UAE and Israel normalized diplomatic relations as part of the September 2020 Abraham Accords, leading to the bolstering of both commercial and strategic ties between the countries. Al Kuwaiti said the connection with Israeli tech companies has been especially helpful in his country’s transition to a digital economy.

Amid the high-level meetings, two networking organizations for information security  professionals in the UAE and Israel signed a memorandum of understanding to promote collaboration. UAE-based EliteCISOs and Israel’s Cyber Together said in a statement that they would cooperate on knowledge-sharing, professional training and cybersecurity workshops to help confront emerging threats to both countries.

The meeting with Netanyahu was held at the headquarters of the Israel Security Agency, or Shin Bet, whose director, Ronen Bar, spoke at the Cyber Week conference about the agency’s increasing use of artificial intelligence.

“The ISA and AI have one thing in common,” Bar said. “We both make a living by looking for patterns and anomalies.” He said the agency has also developed its own Generative AI tool that can be used like OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

Another AI innovation being tested by the ISA is an airport security system that he said would “dramatically change” the screening process before flight check-in.

“Maybe one day we will abandon the traditional favorite question for all of you: Did you pack by yourself,” he said.

Bar said the ISA is setting up a technology incubator to help startups develop generative AI products to address security and intelligence needs. He said AI will help the agency in several areas: prioritizing information; boosting intelligence capabilities by identifying patterns and deviations from patterns; becoming a tool in the decision-making process; and helping to forecast trends and the likelihood of their realization.For the agency, he said, generative AI will be a “partner” at the decision-making table, but not a “decision-maker.”

Speaking at the conference on Monday, a former Pentagon official warned that both government and business aren’t paying enough attention to AI’s potential dangers.

“I think that Israel should be very concerned about what algorithms Iran may be trying to develop or acquire overseas,” said Ezra Cohen, the former acting under secretary of defense for intelligence and security who is now vice president for corporate strategy at Oracle Corp.

“Now I’m not saying that we should be treating AI today like a nuclear weapon or anything like that, but there should be certain procedures that are put in place and I think a lot of these companies are really very juicy targets for the adversary,” Cohen said.

TEL AVIV, Israel – Airwallex, a digital payment platform that aims to disrupt the way businesses move money around the world, is building up its new office in Israel and aiming to expand its reach to the Arab Gulf states.

Founded in 2015  in Melbourne, Australia, Airwallex opened a branch in Tel Aviv in May, hiring Or Liban, a former Google executive, to run operations and expand in the region, Pranav Sood, general manager for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, told The Circuit.

“Across the Middle East, you see young, growing populations – populations that have lots of disposable income and people who are looking to spend online for e-commerce – also to travel and to buy and sell things around the world,” Sood said in an interview from London. “All of those factors mean that the Middle East is a region that we’re very excited about and looking to invest in.”

Airwallex, which processes more than $50 billion in transactions a year, is one of the fastest growing financial technology companies and carries a market value of $5.5 billion. The company raised $902 million from investors that include Salesforce Ventures, Sequoia, MasterCard, Tencent and Lone Pine Capital.

Sood will be in Israel on Monday to attend the Calcalist conference on financial innovation, which is being co-sponsored by Airwallex. Liban is scheduled to speak on a panel about the relationship between banks and fintech companies.

In Israel, the company’s customers include Papaya Global, which helps businesses manage payroll and payments, and OurCrowd, a Jerusalem-based venture capital investing platform. Airwallex has about 1,300 employees in 20 offices, including San Francisco, London, Amsterdam, Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Tokyo. The company is currently recruiting a staff of about 10 employees for its new office in Tel Aviv and is looking at potential acquisitions in Israel in the field of cybersecurity.

“Israel is a market where we are already present and we have customers,” said Sood, 33, who was hired a year ago and visits Israel every two or three months. “When we look at the UAE, we also see opportunity to expand our coverage. Many of our customers want access to the UAE because it’s a strong economy and there’s a lot of international trade that comes out of it.”

Airwallex’s creation story involves a coffee shop the company’s four founders opened as students at the University of Melbourne and “came to the conclusion that it is very, very painful and expensive to buy and sell things around the world,” Sood said. Jack Zhang, now the CEO, had a background in foreign exchange and had written trading algorithms for a number of investment banks, Sood said.

Eight years later, Airwallex is challenging the biggest players in the international payments market, led by the Brussels-based Swift network, which Sood says is too slow.  Airwallex’s proprietary technology revolves around a digital wallet that customers pay into and can use to make payments to countries where it is connected with local banking networks. The company has also focused on developing a “deep regulatory and licensing backbone” around the world, he said. It has managed to carve out a loyal customer base by focusing on small businesses and making it less complicated and expensive for them to pay bills and receive payments across national borders.

Airwallex’s founders “basically thought, ‘you know what, let’s use this experience and expertise and build something that fundamentally changes the way that people move money around the world,’” Sood said.