The DubaiFinancial Services Authority (DFSA) said many brokerage firms in the city'sfinancial center are not keeping pace with the rules on staff trading. Theconclusion follows a review of how those firms police their employees' personaldealing.In itsfirst Conduct Supervisory Pulse, published today (Monday), the regulator saidsome firms lacked basic policies, registers and monitoring for personal accountdealing, even as the sector's headcount and profits climbed.The Pulsecovers the opening phase of a wider 2026 review into how brokers oversee theirtrading environment. Personal account dealing came first, with best executionand communications record-keeping due in later phases.A Sector Outgrowing ItsControlsThe reviewlanded against a fast-growing backdrop. The number of authorized brokeragefirms in the Dubai International Financial Centre rose to 72 in March 2026 from49 in 2022, an increase of 68%, while staff numbers nearly doubled over thesame period.The boomhas stretched the regulator, which sped up its licensing process lastyear afterapplications jumped 18% in the first nine months of 2025.Profitsmoved in the same direction. Combined net profit at DIFC brokerage firmsclimbed to $301 million in 2025 from $80 million in 2023, according to theregulator, a rise of 276%.Gaps in Policies andRecordsThe hardernumbers came from an industry-wide survey the Dubai Financial Services Authority ran as part of an earlierconflicts-of-interest review. It foundthat 18% of firms had no documented personal-account-dealing policies, while32% kept no register of staff trades in any form, manual or electronic.A further59% said approval or notification rules applied only to certain types oftransaction, pointing to wide variation in how firms handle the issue.Theregulator also said its own checks had turned up differences between what somefirms reported about employee trades and what independent enquiries found. Inone case, a firm logged no policy breaches when breaches had in fact occurred.Poorlydesigned or ineffective controls, the DFSA said, "are a sign of weakculture, governance, and oversight."Dubai's Pull on GlobalBrokersThe conductpush comes as Dubai cements its place as a licensing hub for retail tradingfirms. Pepperstone secured a DFSA license for its DIFC subsidiary after amulti-year application process, joining a steady stream of brokers setting upin the emirate.Others havecome through the DFSA or the separate Securities and Commodities Authority,including XM, Plus500, XTB and RoboMarkets, drawn by the region's high-valuetraders and its position between European and Asian trading hours.ThinkMarkets won DFSA approval to onboard UAE clients, partof a wave the regulator has tried to manage by automating parts of itsauthorization workflow. The Pulse signals that supervision is now catching upwith that intake.Personalaccount dealing is well-trodden ground for the kind of conduct regulator Dubaiis starting to resemble. Theapproach echoes the FCA in London, where staff-dealing and surveillance ruleshave long underpinned market-abuse enforcement, and the DFSA is now led by Mark Steward, the former FCAenforcement chief who took over as chief executive in May. What Comes NextThe DFSAframed personal account dealing as one piece of broader market-conduct risk,and warned that firms failing to manage it could face regulatory action. It pointedto over-reliance on employee declarations, thin post-trade monitoring and weakrecord-keeping as the most common shortfalls.Bestexecution, the focus of a later phase, has driven enforcement at peerregulators before, including a FINRA fine against Deutsche BankSecurities overorder-routing practices. Communications and record-keeping will round out thereview.As thesector grows, the DFSA said, firms should keep their controls aligned to thesize and complexity of their business, and may later be asked to show how theyhave responded.This article was written by Damian Chmiel at www.financemagnates.com.