Dubai is at the heart of everything FinTech, providing one of the world’s best ecosystems to foster innovation, attracting record investments and growth at an accelerated pace.
With the success of Dubai Fintech Summit in providing a truly global platform for the world’s Fintech community, the Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC) – home to the largest financial ecosystem in the Middle East, Africa and South Asia (MEASA) region – is reaffirming its position as one of the world’s top fintech hubs, attracting record investments and growing at an accelerated pace, with new company registrations surpassing 1,000 for the first time in history to reach total number of active registered companies of 4,377.
Organised on May 8 and 9, the DIFC’s Dubai Fintech Summit served as the platform for more than 5,000 experts, policymakers, industry leaders, thought leaders, and decisionmakers to come together and share ideas, knowledge and perspectives that can help unlock a new phase of exponential growth for the global financial sector. DIFC leveraged the Dubai Fintech Summit platform to bring together banks, fintech startups, and regulators from across the world to further stimulate the digital advancement of the financial sector and shape the future of finance.
“The financial centre has been expanding five-fold faster than the emirate’s average gross domestic product growth over the past 10 years, contributing about 6 per cent to its GDP,” said H.E. Essa Kazim, DIFC Governor, during his keynote address.
He further added that “a key growth driver over the past three years has been fintech and innovation companies contributing over 27 per cent to the centre’s overall client growth.” Proactive approach taken by policymakers and measures taken to provide the right ecosystem to enable innovation, investing, investment, and growth have all contributed to the rapid growth of the fintech sector, he added.
Fintech and innovation, in particular, has been a strong growth area for DIFC in 2022, with the hub now home to over 686 fintech companies that include startups and global unicorns. DIFC is also working towards identifying, enabling, and growing 10 high-calibre fintech startups, based in both India and the UAE, into unicorns by 2025, as part of the partnership it entered into with Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce & Industry (FICCI) LEAD to launch the India-UAE Startup Corridor.
“There is no denying the fact that UAE is one of the most attractive countries for investment. The business environment here has always been conducive to the needs of major global companies. What’s most amazing is how the UAE and the Middle East have always stayed ahead of the curve and embraced the best of new and emerging technologies. With business-friendly environment, we believe that the region will see exponential growth when it comes to becoming a hub for startups and entrepreneurship,” Kush Mehra, President and Chief Business Officer of Indian fintech major Pine Labs told.
Earlier this year, leading merchant commerce omnichannel platform Pine Labs, which recently forayed into the UAE market, said it will partner with local banks and financial institutions in the UAE to help them serve their merchant partners better. Banks in the UAE will benefit from a simple and easy-to-use technology stack that Pine Labs offers to build innovative products into consumer journeys. Local incumbent banks in the UAE will get seamless tech integrations that Pine Labs is known to deliver the speed and scale.
Going forward too, experts believe the focus on tech and innovation, digital transformation, and foreign trade, among other transformational projects, will drive an increase in foreign direct investment to over 650 billion dirhams over the next decade and an annual 100 billion dirhams in contributions from digital transformation. This, in turn, will enable the emirate to cement its position among the top three global financial centres and meet its ambitious 10-year D33 economic targets by 2033.