Dubai is not a city that waits for permission to innovate, but one that builds, iterates, and redefines its own future, and nowhere is this more visible than in the intersection of trade and finance. This is the logic behind the DMCC Financial Centre, a working title for a fully operational financial centre which will be formally unveiled later this month during the Dubai Precious Metals Conference. Unlike our regional peers, we are not starting from zero, but formalising what already exists.

Out of more than 26,000 active companies across our district, DMCC is home to 1,620 in banking, insurance, family offices, fintech, and investment. These firms do not operate in silos but are part of a broader architecture that already links trade to capital, digital innovation to regulation, and physical commodities to liquid markets.

As the only free zone to bootstrap its rise, initially through a USD 200 million Gold Sukuk, DMCC used the funds to construct three commercial towers, including Almas, the world's tallest diamond tower. Within five years, despite the 2008 downturn, DMCC repaid the sukuk in full, affirming the confidence of His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE, and Ruler of Dubai. That prudence continued, most recently evidenced by the complete sale of all units in Uptown Tower. In addition to its headline developments, DMCC's ecosystems have also grown to provide the right foundation for the forthcoming financial centre.

Consider DGCX. Launched almost 20 years ago as the Middle East's first commodity derivatives exchange, it has grown into the region's largest. By June this year, over one million contracts had traded, a 30 per cent increase in average daily volumes year-on-year, while the value of its Shariah-compliant gold spot contracts rose almost 200 per cent year-on-year. In a world of heightened volatility, rate hikes and geopolitical disruption, hedging demand has surged, whether in gold, currencies, or the INR Quanto product that links rupee futures to global hedge structures.

Meanwhile, the Dubai Commodities Clearing Corporation (DCCC), DMCC's wholly owned clearing house, processes trades across asset classes under a robust risk-management framework, with real-time margining and default systems aligned with the global Principles for Financial Market Infrastructures (PFMI). Like truly great infrastructure, it is largely invisible, which is precisely why it works.

While hard for many of today's generation to imagine, finance is so much more than just digital screens and order books, but assets you can touch. It is gold bars, diamonds, coffee, and cocoa, all of which require secure handling, legal certainty, and instant settlement. It is for these reasons DMCC built its eponymous Vault, the Gulf's only privately managed, subterranean, large-scale safe, and DMCC Tradeflow, its online platform that registered more than Dh1.4 trillion ($381 billion) in Islamic finance transactions last year. These platforms enable asset-backed financing, warehouse receipts, and the kind of digital tokenisation pilots that the rest of the world still only talks about.

The DMCC Wealth Hub, launched last month, was its first deliberate attempt to bring family offices, private capital, and structuring firms into a single ecosystem. As a preferred entry point for global wealth, it offers licensing for SPVs, HoldCos, Foundations, DAOs, and other cross-border structures, supported by direct access to legal and fiduciary experts. When combined with real-world assets held on Tradeflow, a regulated derivatives exchange, and a fully integrated clearing house, something powerful begins to take shape.

DMCC already matches investment with opportunity, connecting members to direct lending, co-investment, and private-capital deal flow. It also supports complex wealth structuring through specialised licence frameworks, underpinned by access to Common Law courts. More broadly, the district provides sector-specific training in investment management, alternative markets, and regulatory compliance, alongside a calendar of elite networking events from executive roundtables and VIP investor receptions to private summits. Through DMCC's partners, we offer expertise in estate planning, succession governance, and multi-generational wealth preservation within the same ecosystem that powers global commodities and digital trade.

In a global context, DMCC Financial Centre will offer a unique proposition. While hubs such as Geneva, Singapore and Hong Kong are competing to build the gap between trade, finance and technology, DMCC's model connects physical commodities, regulated financial infrastructure and digital innovation, thereby helping to integrate real-world assets and technology with next generation capital flows. Domestically, it also provides a service designed to complement, rather than compete with the UAE's existing financial infrastructure such as DIFC and ADGM.

It is for these reasons why DMCC is formalising the DMCC Financial Centre now. Anchored by a regulatory framework that caters to both conventional and digital financial services, the centre will act as a clustering platform for trade finance, fintech, banking, investment, supply chain solutions, and embedded finance, not in theory, but across our district.

Critically, it is not being built in isolation. DMCC's work with the UAE's Securities and Commodities Authority ensures alignment with national regulatory standards, while its MoU between DIFC's Dispute Resolution Authority (DRA) enhances access to world-class dispute resolution services and bilateral trade relations. More recently, its recent partnership with VARA will open new ground in tokenised commodities and digital asset infrastructure.

The global trade finance gap, estimated at $2.5 trillion, is not going away. Nor is the need for capital to move faster, more transparently, and with less friction. The DMCC Financial Centre exists because the world needs ecosystems that can turn physical trade into financial value without forcing companies to choose between innovation and regulation.

When the Dubai Precious Metals Conference returns on November 25, it will not be to announce a“new initiative”, but to explain why the DMCC Financial Centre is the most natural evolution of what DMCC was always designed to be: a place where trade meets liquidity, where infrastructure meets innovation, and where Dubai's role as a global marketplace for value becomes undeniable.

We are not building a financial centre to catch up. We are naming it because it already exists, and giving it the scale it deserves.

Ahmed Bin Sulayem is the Executive Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of DMCC.

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