BHM Capital has become the first UAE financial institution to connect to Kazakhstan’s Astana International Exchange (AIX) as a Market Making Member, the company announced on 7 August 2026. The connection runs through Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange’s (ADX) Tabadul platform, the infrastructure that links ADX to a growing network of regional and international exchanges.
What Market Making Member status covers
As a Market Making Member on AIX, BHM Capital will provide continuous buy and sell quotes intended to support liquidity and price discovery on the exchange, rather than simply routing client orders to it.
Abdel Hadi Al Sa’di, BHM Capital’s chief executive, said,
“The connection reflects our continued commitment to expanding our market making capabilities, strengthening connectivity between regional capital markets, and delivering innovative liquidity solutions.”
listed on the Dubai Financial Market and Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange, and regulated by the UAE Securities and Commodities Authority.
Let’s look at the track record – established market maker
The AIX connection extends a role BHM Capital has held domestically for years. Established in 2006, the company already acts as , including Alpha Data, ADNH Catering, Lulu Retail Holding and GFH Financial Group, and became in 2023. It has also already extended that business beyond the UAE, commencing market-making operations on the Bahrain Bourse before this AIX announcement.
That track record matters for reading the AIX news correctly: this isn’t a UAE brokerage stepping into market making for the first time in an unfamiliar market. It’s an established domestic liquidity provider adding a second international exchange to a business it has already been building outward, Bahrain first, now Kazakhstan.
What Tabadul and AIX actually are
Tabadul is ADX’s cross-border trading and connectivity platform, launched in 2022. It now links seven exchanges, ADX, the Muscat Stock Exchange, Bahrain Bourse, the Amman Stock Exchange, the Kazakhstan Stock Exchange, the Armenia Securities Exchange and AIX, giving investors access to more than 700 listed companies across markets worth over $1 trillion in combined capitalisation. Tabadul’s own reported Q1 2026 traded value, AED6.3 billion, was up 24% year on year.
, with the Shanghai Stock Exchange, the Silk Road Fund and Nasdaq among its shareholders. Nasdaq also supplies AIX’s trading technology, and the exchange operates under an English common law-based regulatory framework rather than Kazakhstan’s domestic civil code, a structure designed to make it more familiar to international investors.
AIX itself is growing quickly. The exchange’s own 2025 results show trading turnover of $2.1 billion, up 59% from $1.3 billion in 2024, with $4.9 billion in capital raised during the year and $11.9 billion since inception. The exchange listed 215 new securities in 2025, taking its total to 368 securities from 195 issuers, and its retail investor base grew from 1.9 million to 3 million accounts.
AIX now counts 65 trading members across Kazakhstan, China, Europe and the Middle East. Its highest-profile listing of the year, Jiaxin International Resources, ran as a cross-border IPO alongside the Hong Kong Stock Exchange and drew more than $34 billion in demand.
For a UAE market maker, that growth curve is the actual commercial case for the AIX connection: a fast-growing exchange with rising retail participation and an expanding pool of trading members is a market where continuous liquidity provision has more to actually do, not just a flag-planting exercise in a new geography.
