The investment environment has changed
The scale of enterprise technology investment across the Arab world has shifted materially in the past three years. Saudi Vision 2030, the UAE’s diversification agenda, and Egypt’s economic modernization programmes have all created conditions where finance and operations leaders are being asked — often for the first time — to build the performance infrastructure that a more complex, faster-moving business environment requires.
The budgets are real. The mandates are serious. The urgency is genuine.
What has not always kept pace is the organizational readiness to absorb and operationalize these investments. Technology is being procured faster than the business processes, data governance frameworks, and internal capabilities needed to make it work can be developed.
The result, in too many organizations, is significant capital committed to EPM, BI, and automation platforms that are either underperforming, partially implemented, or sitting unused while the teams meant to run them work around them.
Where the real priorities lie in 2026
For finance leaders in Saudi Arabia and the UAE:
The consolidation requirement is becoming more complex, not less. As Vision 2030 portfolio companies mature, as family-owned conglomerates restructure for new markets, and as government-linked entities begin reporting to international standards, the demand for robust multi-entity consolidation — with proper intercompany elimination, multi-currency handling, and multi-GAAP reporting — is significant and growing.
Most organizations in this space are managing consolidation through processes that will not scale to the environment they are entering. The priority in 2026 is not another dashboard. It is getting the financial close and consolidation foundation right — so that the reporting built on top of it is actually reliable.
For finance leaders in Egypt:
The pressure is different but equally real. Egyptian enterprises are navigating FX complexity, regulatory reporting requirements, and multi-entity structures that their current systems were not built to handle at scale.
The priority for Egyptian finance leaders in 2026 is closing the gap between what their ERP and EPM systems can produce and what their business actually needs for planning and control. Most Egyptian organizations with significant Hyperion or Oracle EPM installations are using a fraction of what those platforms can do — not because of the technology, but because the implementation was never completed to the depth the business required.
That is a recoverable position. But it requires investment in depth, not in additional tools.
For both markets — the automation opportunity:
Across both markets, the finance function still carries a significant volume of manual work that should not exist: data consolidation from multiple source systems, intercompany reconciliation, management reporting assembly, regulatory submission formatting.
These are not complex automation problems. They are systematic, repetitive processes with clear logic — exactly the processes that intelligent automation handles well. The organizations that address this in 2026 will enter 2027 with finance teams that spend more time on analysis and less time on assembly.
The organizations that do not will find themselves adding headcount to compensate for processes that should have been automated two years earlier.
The mistake that is being made most consistently
Across both markets, the most consistent and expensive mistake we observe is selecting and procuring technology before the business requirements are clear.
This is understandable. The procurement cycle has its own momentum, vendors are persuasive, and the pressure to show progress is real. But a system selected before the business process is understood will be configured to a general template, not to the actual operating model of the organization. The gap between what was promised and what is delivered becomes apparent only after go-live — when the cost of correction is highest.
The organizations that are getting the most from their technology investments in 2026 are the ones that invested time and expert advice in the assessment and requirements phase before the selection decision was made. That work is unglamorous and often feels like a delay. In practice, it is the difference between an implementation that delivers and one that requires rescue.
What this means in practice
The organizations best positioned to perform in 2026 and beyond are not necessarily the ones with the most recent technology. They are the ones with the clearest understanding of what their finance and operations functions actually need, a performance infrastructure that is correctly implemented and properly validated, and the internal capability to run it without depending on the implementation partner for every change.
Building that position takes deliberate investment — in the right technology, implemented with the right depth, by people who understand both the platform and the business environment in which it operates.
That is the standard we hold every engagement to.
Loop Wise Solutions advises enterprise finance and operations teams across Egypt and the GCC on EPM strategy, BI design, and automation — from assessment through implementation and beyond.
Contact: Contact@loop-wise.com | www.loop-wise.com
