PwC Middle East has entered an exclusive strategic collaboration with Label, a specialist regtech firm, to deliver automated FATCA, CRS and CARF compliance solutions to financial institutions across the Middle East. The agreement designates PwC Middle East as Label’s sole regional partner for on-premise deployments.
Label’s platform claims more than €500 billion in assets under management reported through its compliance infrastructure across multiple jurisdictions. The collaboration is positioned to extend that footprint into the Gulf and wider Middle East, where regulatory obligations around cross-border tax reporting are tightening in line with global standards.
What the partnership covers
Under the arrangement, the two firms will offer a jointly branded end-to-end solution spanning advisory, implementation, reporting execution and ongoing compliance management. The on-premise delivery model is notable: while many regtech platforms push clients towards cloud-hosted SaaS, a number of Gulf-region financial institutions operate under data-residency or internal governance policies that require software to run within their own infrastructure. PwC Middle East’s role as the exclusive implementation partner reflects that dynamic.
Bilal Abba, partner and Middle East global information reporting leader at PwC Middle East, said the collaboration was designed to help clients navigate a more demanding compliance landscape “through technology-enabled solutions that deliver greater accuracy, transparency and efficiency.” Label’s CEO and co-founder Rodrigo Ruiz framed the deal as a significant step in the company’s growth, describing the combined offering as one that helps institutions “simplify compliance, improve reporting quality and adapt to an increasingly demanding regulatory environment.”
Regulatory backdrop
The timing is tied closely to the introduction of the Crypto-Asset Reporting Framework. CARF, developed by the OECD, extends automatic exchange-of-information obligations to crypto-asset transactions and is being adopted progressively across jurisdictions, with a number of early adopters targeting 2027 reporting cycles. Gulf states including the UAE have been active participants in the OECD’s inclusive framework, and the region’s financial institutions face the same onboarding and classification challenges as their European counterparts.
Alongside CARF, existing FATCA and CRS obligations continue to generate operational pressure. Tax authorities globally have increased audit activity and error-rate scrutiny, raising the commercial value of platforms that improve data quality and audit trails rather than simply producing the required output files.
The regtech market for tax transparency tooling is competitive. Established players in the FATCA and CRS software space include firms such as Sovos, Sievert Larson and a number of banking technology vendors with compliance modules. Label’s differentiation appears to rest on its CARF-readiness and a model that pairs regulatory expertise with a self-serve SaaS option alongside the full-service offering targeted at institutions that prefer a managed outcome. The PwC partnership adds distribution credibility in a region where professional-services relationships often determine enterprise software procurement.
The next substantive milestones to watch are the first named financial institution deployments and whether the exclusive on-premise arrangement is extended to include cloud-hosted implementations as regional data-residency norms evolve.
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