(Bloomberg) — In the midst of the financial crisis, as bankers around the world worried about their fate, May Nasrallah made a bold decision.

Having reluctantly agreed five years earlier to a request by Morgan Stanley’s John Mack to move to Dubai and set up an investment-banking hub for the U.S. company, she decided to resign. Not because she wanted to do less in the region. She wanted to do more.

In 2010, she established a boutique advisory firm, deNovo, to work with wealthy clients in the Middle East. Nine years later, her decision is paying off. Boutiques are earning almost a quarter of all investment-banking fees paid in the region, up from just 9 percent in 2009, according to Freeman Consulting Services.

After the financial crisis, “big banks like Morgan Stanley were focused on multibillion-dollar cross-border deals for the region’s largest sovereign wealth funds,” Nasrallah said in an interview. “I thought people that really needed our advisory help were the family groups and the firms operating in the region’s real economy.”

Fee Pool

Still, bankers looking to go it alone in the Middle East face a variety of challenges, said Alex Gemici, a former managing director at Deutsche Bank AG who left in 2011 to form Dubai-based investment-placement firm Greenstone Equity Partners.

“Even if the founder has deep personal relationships within the region, clients and counterparties want to feel comfortable that any new firm will have longevity and will operate with the same standards as the global banks,” he said. “Once these challenges are overcome — which took years in our case — there is substantial interest in working with boutiques that are based in the region and offer an alternative to the global firms.”

Sovereign Funds

Nasrallah’s firm has carved out a niche advising family groups on deals, and working with sovereign wealth funds or large corporations on acquisitions and restructuring. They also can offer a second opinion not tied to selling any other bank products.

Being focused on the Middle East can help differentiate a boutique adviser, said Amer Huneidi, chairman of regional industrial gas company Gulf Cryo. “We had been working with a global bank on a transaction but the shareholders were not happy with them,” he said. “So we engaged deNovo and, frankly, the local knowledge they had of the market and mentality of the region was much better.”

Ultimately, Nasrallah said her goal is to build an investment advisory firm of the same ilk as Rothschild & Co. for the Middle East. That commitment is a change for someone who spent most of her early career avoiding the Middle East after wars forced her to leave Lebanon in 1975 and Kuwait in 1990. She shifted between roles in New York, Hong Kong and London before eventually moving to Dubai in 2005 as Morgan Stanley looked to capitalize on an oil-fueled economic boom.

Male Dominated

Political instability wasn’t the only thing that had put Nasrallah off moving to the Middle East. She also was wary of moving to a region dominated by men.

“At first I thought it was a strange to have John Mack ask me, a woman, to go to the Middle East to head investment banking, and suggested he consider asking a man do the role instead, but his answer was, ‘You are the right man for the job,”’ said Nasrallah, who has a master’s degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management.