Fintech compliance in MENA with AI (Episode 45)
In this episode, I sit down with Bhavin Shah, founder and CEO of Sherlocq.
Guests
Show notes
In this episode, I sit down with Bhavin Shah, founder and CEO of Sherlocq.
Bhavin is the Founder and CEO of Sherlocq, an AI-powered regulatory intelligence company helping compliance professionals, law firms, and regulators navigate complex global regulations with greater speed, accuracy, and security. With more than 20 years of experience across the U.S., UK, Middle East, and Asia, Bhavin has built a global reputation in financial crime, compliance, investigations, and governance.
Before launching Sherlocq, he held senior leadership roles at Deloitte, PwC, EY, Roland Berger, Forensic Risk Alliance, and Secretariat, advising global banks, sovereign institutions, private equity firms, and digital platforms on high-stakes regulatory matters. Bhavin is also a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader, a recognised thought leader in AI and compliance, and an advisor on financial and regulatory innovation.
With him, we will talk about the fintech market in the MENA region, how regulations are shaping this market, but also the differences between investing in fintech in different parts of the world.
In this episode
Bhavin Shah, a regulatory consultant for over 25 years, explains why he founded Sherlocq to use generative AI to help compliance teams interpret regulations instead of mapping them by hand. He describes a free app for anyone working in compliance and custom assistants for banks, law firms and regulators, why AI should support rather than replace compliance officers, and why the moat is human expertise across jurisdictions. He also shares views on neobanks, BNPL and the talent hubs of global fintech.
Chapters
- 0:00Introduction and Sherlocq
- 1:28The problem of mapping regulation
- 3:27Why compliance needs a profession
- 8:19Compliance officers as enablers and guardians
- 10:14From consultant to founder
- 13:24Go-to-market: advisers, community and B2B
- 20:22Why agentic AI in finance needs a human in the loop
- 24:50Choosing where to build
- 28:10Hiring regulatory talent in Europe
- 32:18Fintech trends: neobanks and BNPL
- 40:57Raising capital
- 43:38Advice for founders
Key facts
Bhavin has spent over 25 years in financial services consulting, helping set up six financial institutions and advising central banks, later focusing on enforcement and financial crime.
Sherlocq uses generative AI to help compliance teams interpret regulations and map them to policies, work that once needed teams of 15–20 people.
Sherlocq has about ten senior advisers, including four former regulators, all of whom are also investors.
Sherlocq's free app for anyone working in compliance gained 250 users in its first 48 hours.
Sherlocq builds custom assistants for banks, law firms and regulators, which can cut document review time by 70–80%.
Sherlocq is a US company with an operating entity in Abu Dhabi, a tech hub in India, and plans for entities in Europe and Asia; it will build its regulatory talent hub in Europe.
Sherlocq raised about $2.8 million in pre-seed funding and plans to raise $8–10 million next.
Sherlocq offers connectors for Claude and ChatGPT and is building them for Gemini and Copilot.
Compliance is only about 50 years old as a profession and has no formal qualification, so two compliance officers at the same bank can give different answers.
Like stablecoins, agentic AI in finance will be adopted slowly; agents should assist, with humans making decisions.
Neobanks known mainly for flashy cards haven't displaced big banks; lasting value comes from saving customers time, as Mercury and Stripe do.
The risk with BNPL is that governments cannot see it in personal debt figures, so overexposure can build unnoticed.
Questions and answers
Why is Sherlocq hard to copy?
Reading regulation is easy; understanding how rules connect across jurisdictions needs deep human expertise built into the system.
How should compliance officers see their role?
As enablers of controlled growth who also guard the wider financial system.
What is Bhavin's advice to founders?
There are no shortcuts: study the market deeply and build something customers will actually pay for.