Ripple Executive Shares Dubai Fintech Summit Takeaways: Institutional Adoption Inevitable, Focus Shifts to Infrastructure Upgrades. Reece Merrick, Senior Executive Director and Managing Director for the Middle East and Africa at Ripple, stated at the Dubai Fintech Summit that discussions with executives from BlackRock, Standard Chartered, and Robinhood yielded a consensus: institutional adoption of digital assets is no longer a question of "if," but rather what infrastructure is needed to support it. Key takeaways from the discussion include: first, building 24/7 financial infrastructure to meet the round-the-clock settlement demands of the next-generation digital asset market; and second, bridging traditional finance (TradFi) and decentralized finance (DeFi), where the scaling of tokenized markets requires bank-grade infrastructure, reliable custody, and risk management systems.