MENA brokerage still fights an old reputation. Too much noise. Too much pressure. Too many products sold before traders understood the risk. Tarik Chebib, CEO Middle East at Capital.com, is one of the leaders openly trying to flip that story — not with another leverage line, but with who he hires, how he builds product, and how he talks about the market.
He put it plainly on LinkedIn. Build for Arabic speakers when everyone else chased the western expat. Put early-twenties creatives on the content engine instead of waiting for “established financial analysts.” Treat education and habit as the long game in a crowded region. His own About section calls the niche what it is: fintech, MENA markets, and what it takes to build something from nothing with a licence, a team and real P&L pressure.
That is the frame for this ANC leadership spotlight.
From sales floor to MENA CEO
Chebib’s path is public and non-linear. Sales trader and mentoring roles at IG in London, then Trading Services Manager and Head of Sales for MENA in the region. Head of Middle East at Pepperstone. Group Chief Revenue Officer across Capital.com and Currency.com in 2021. CEO Middle East from August 2022. Cass Business School MSc with Distinction, Brunel First Class Honours, and a basketball first-team past he still cites as the place he learned how to lose, recover and show up again.
He has said he went from zero to hundreds of millions in revenue building Capital.com’s Middle East operation in about five years. The office story he keeps posting is the people story: over a hundred staff, more than thirty nationalities, and a claim of hiring more than 200 people across a decade of UAE recruiting. Featured posts with the office flags are where the “34 Flags strong” line comes from.
Who he recruits — and at what level
This is where the reputation shift gets practical. In a live post this week he asked for a marketing team of “creative disruptors, unconventional thinkers, experimenters and boundary pushers,” with a 2027 budget he put at $70–100m. He and Chief of Staff Stephanie Ciccarello said they would read every DM themselves. An earlier ops hiring post said the desk is “Ai first” and wants to automate. Another post on Arabic-first growth listed early-twenties talent as “the most important thing,” alongside owned reach on TikTok, YouTube and Instagram that he puts at about 100 million views a year with no paid spend behind it.
That is not the old MENA sales-floor stereotype. The bar he keeps describing is ambition, ownership and cultural fit — marketers, operators, compliance, finance and sales relationship managers — mixed with people in fintech for the first time and people who already shipped at scale.
Innovation and AI
On product, the public record matches the hiring talk. TradingView inside the platform. UX and education awards. A Model Context Protocol server for MENA clients so AI agents can research and, only after a two-step human confirmation, act. A push toward regulated spot virtual assets after Capital Vault’s CMA licence. In interviews he frames AI as a way to help traders unlearn bad habits and free teams for higher-value work. The Lucidity conversation put the internal picture bluntly: a small human core working with hundreds of AI agents. Human still pulls the trigger.
How he sees the market and the industry
His market view is practical. Retail in MENA, he has argued, is moving through a trading cycle — crypto opened the door, then gold, gas and indices became the next step — and platforms that educate will keep those clients as they mature. Pulse Report figures he commented on for H1 2026 showed UAE clients trading more than a trillion dollars on the platform in the half, with gold more than half of that UAE value, and a rising share of trades carrying a stop-loss. Expansion talk has covered Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Oman and Kuwait, with the regional hub also framed as a bridge toward Africa and Asia.
Industry-wise he keeps returning to the same contrast: transactional brokerage versus brand, local language, regulated rails and talent. The Emirates cabin creative his team ran for a year and a half — “the only capital you need to know is capital.com” — is still the piece he cites most. The new brand, he says, has to land in Arabic and English as something people immediately get, not a translation pasted on.
He is already in the spotlight: Dubai FinTech Summit 2026 on embedded finance with talabat and Botim, SEF26 on where MENA should invest, Business Today Middle East on gold and AI-driven retail flow, Open Equity and Lucidity on leadership and AI. This piece is not inventing a leader. It is naming what his public record actually does — attack the negative image of brokerage by upgrading the people, the product and the story traders hear.
For traders and builders watching MENA
If you trade, check regulation, costs and risk tools before you fund anything. When the product fits your region and risk tolerance, open your account and start trading with Capital.com. If you build an IB or affiliate desk, watch how leaders like Chebib hire and localise — that is often where the next decade of MENA retail is decided.
Want the desk side of this? Join ANC Trading Community free for the analysis, tools and community. Building your own IB network? Become an IB with ANC and we will walk you through the IB portal setup.
ANC keeps tracking MENA leadership moves so the community can read them in one place. For a related roundup, see our MENA broker leadership piece on Exclusive Markets, Grand Markets and Definite. Compare rails on our brokers page. And if you want the room where we bring brokers and IBs together, register for Go Beyond the Charts.
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