A valuation engagement in the GCC usually involves two standards at once, and most of the avoidable cost in the work comes from treating them as one.
The first is IVS, the International Valuation Standards. The second is whatever national regime applies in the market where the valuation will be used. In Saudi Arabia that regime is administered by TAQEEM, the Saudi Authority for Accredited Valuers. The two layers do different jobs, and confusing them produces a specific and expensive failure: a technically sound valuation that cannot be used for the purpose it was commissioned for.
What each layer actually governs
IVS governs the thinking. It sets out the bases of value, defines what market value means and how it differs from investment value or fair value, describes the valuation approaches and when each is appropriate, and specifies what a valuation must address to be complete. It is deliberately international and deliberately not administrative. It does not tell you who is allowed to sign, and it does not prescribe a filing format.
The national regime governs the practice. Who may hold themselves out as a valuer. What licence category covers which asset class. What a report must contain and in what structure. What evidence is acceptable. Which language the report is issued in. How it is filed and to whom.
The relationship is layered, not parallel. A national regime generally adopts the international framework and then adds the professional and procedural apparatus around it. So the question is never "IVS or TAQEEM". It is: the international standard tells me how to reason about value; the national regime tells me what the finished document has to be.
The gap where the cost hides
Here is the pattern that wastes the most time in practice.
A firm builds its valuation process around the analytical work: gathering inputs, selecting comparables, applying approaches, reaching a conclusion. That work is genuinely the skilled part, and it is where experienced valuers want to spend their time.
The compliance wrapper is then treated as a formatting exercise at the end. Someone takes the analysis and pours it into the required report structure, checks the mandatory disclosures are present, produces the Arabic version, and files it.
This works until any one of four things happens: the report structure changes, the engagement crosses into a second jurisdiction, the asset class turns out to sit under a different licence category, or a reviewer asks where a specific figure came from. At that point the "formatting exercise" turns into a partial rebuild, because the analysis was never structured to be reassembled, only to be written up once.
Eight jurisdictions, one problem
The GCC compounds this. A firm operating across several markets is not running one process with cosmetic variations. Reporting currency differs. Licensing and recognition differ. Report content requirements differ. What counts as acceptable evidence for a comparable differs. Filing obligations differ.
The temptation is to maintain one master template with a set of local exceptions bolted on. This degrades predictably: the exceptions accumulate, no one is certain which market a given clause belongs to, and eventually a report goes out with a requirement from the wrong jurisdiction in it.
The alternative is to hold market rules as data rather than as accumulated template convention: the regime as a parameter of the engagement, not as tribal knowledge in a senior associate's head. That is harder to set up and considerably cheaper to run.
Four asset classes, four evidence problems
Valuation logic is not uniform across what is being valued, and the practical difficulty is usually evidential rather than mathematical.
Real estate has the richest comparable evidence and the most argument about which comparables are admissible and how they should be adjusted.
Businesses require forecast assumptions to be defensible, which shifts the burden from finding evidence to justifying reasoning.
Machinery and equipment turns on condition, remaining useful life, and installation context: evidence that lives in inspection records rather than in market databases.
Precious metals and gemstones depend on certification and assay provenance, where the chain of evidence itself carries most of the value.
A single generic pipeline handles none of these well. Each needs its own evidence model underneath a common reporting structure.
Where automation is legitimate, and where it is not
This distinction matters more in valuation than in most fields, because a signature carries personal professional liability.
Software can properly do: extracting structured data from source documents, arithmetic and cross-footing, applying the correct report structure for the market, checking mandatory content is present, flagging internal inconsistency, maintaining an audit trail from every figure back to its source, and producing both language versions from one set of numbers.
Software should not do: selecting the basis of value, deciding which approach is appropriate, choosing and adjusting comparables, or forming the concluding opinion. Those are judgments, and the licence exists precisely because someone must be accountable for them.
The correct framing is that automation should remove everything that stands *between* the valuer and their judgment, not the judgment itself. A valuer who spends three of every four hours reformatting, re-keying, and reconciling is not being helped by their tools.
The bilingual requirement is not a translation task
Producing an Arabic and an English version by translating a finished English document introduces a real risk: two documents that can drift. A figure corrected in one and not the other, a qualification present in one and lost in the other.
Generating both from the same underlying set of numbers removes that class of error entirely. The languages become renderings of one valuation rather than two documents that are supposed to agree.
What to do about it
- Separate the evidence layer from the report layer. Hold inputs structured and sourced; treat the report as a rendering of them. This is the change that makes everything else cheap.
- Hold market rules as data. One template with exception branches will fail as soon as a fifth market is added.
- Automate up to the judgment and stop. The line is defensible, auditable, and worth drawing explicitly.
- Generate both languages from one source of numbers. Never translate a finished report.
Mizan is built on that separation: an IVS and TAQEEM compliance engine with per-market regulatory logic across eight GCC jurisdictions, AI data extraction into a structured evidence layer, bilingual reporting from a single set of figures, and coverage of real estate, business, machinery and equipment, and precious metals and gemstones. The judgment stays with the valuer. The rebuilding does not have to happen twice.