By Dapo Ako, Deputy CEO, j. awan & partners

The United Arab Emirates regulates financial services across several authorities. Onshore, the Central Bank of the UAE (CBUAE) covers banking, insurance and payments, and the Capital Market Authority (CMA, formerly the SCA) covers securities and capital markets. The two financial free zones each have their own regulator: the DFSA in the DIFC and the FSRA in the ADGM. The Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority (VARA) oversees virtual assets across Dubai. In March 2026, independent analysts ranked Dubai among the world's top ten financial centres for the first time. That ranking is a lagging indicator of a shift that has been building for several years: international capital increasingly treats a UAE regulatory authorisation as evidence of governance quality, extending well beyond market access alone. Firms that navigate that shift successfully treat jurisdiction choice and the market entry process itself as a strategic exercise central to how the business is built.

The signal in the data: why 2026 reads differently

Anyone tracking the UAE's financial sector has seen strong growth numbers before. What changed in the first quarter of 2026 was independent confirmation from outside the region. In March, the Global Financial Centres Index (GFCI), produced twice yearly by Z/Yen and the China Development Institute from more than 34,000 practitioner assessments and upwards of 100 external data sources including the World Bank and the OECD, ranked Dubai seventh globally. It is Dubai's highest-ever placement and the first time any Middle East, Africa or South Asia centre has entered the global top ten, moving ahead of established hubs including Los Angeles and Chicago. Abu Dhabi was separately ranked first in the MENA region and 12th globally in NYU Stern's inaugural Financial Centre Competitiveness Index, published in December 2025.

Both indices are compiled independently of the jurisdictions they rank, which is what makes the placement meaningful. When an external, practitioner-driven measure catches up to a jurisdiction's own growth figures, it typically means the growth has moved from being a story about volume of registrations to being a story about the quality of what is being built.

The underlying 2025 figures support that reading. DIFC closed the year with 8,844 active registered companies, up 28 per cent year-on-year on a record 2,525 new registrations, according to results the Centre released in February 2026. Of those, 1,052 are regulated financial services firms, and the DFSA now supervises 980 entities directly, up 17 per cent on 2024. ADGM ended 2025 with 12,671 active licences, up 30 per cent, and 347 licensed financial institutions, 80 of them newly authorised during the year, while assets under management across its 171 fund managers rose 36 per cent. In December 2025, ADGM's FSRA issued Binance its first formal global operating licence, a marker of how far institutional appetite for regulated digital asset activity has moved in Abu Dhabi specifically.

The convergence of traditional finance and digital assets

The more interesting trend sitting inside these numbers sits beyond the growth of any single framework. It is the erosion of the line between them. DIFC's fintech and innovation cluster grew 35 per cent in 2025 to 1,677 entities. ADGM welcomed digital asset firms alongside global private banks and legal advisers in the same twelve months. And VARA, now four years old, has moved from onboarding almost exclusively crypto-native exchanges in its first licensing wave to authorising institutional financial services groups extending into digital assets in its current one, a shift reflected in a licensed VASP count that, by mid-2026, had grown to roughly fifty, a total exceeding the licensed platform counts reported in both Hong Kong and Singapore.

The practical consequence is that applicants increasingly bring hybrid propositions to their chosen regulator: brokerage combined with digital asset endorsements, wealth platforms layering in tokenised products, payments businesses built with AI-enabled infrastructure from inception. This is precisely the activity the UAE's three frameworks have built capacity to host. A consequence of this convergence is that jurisdiction selection has become considerably more strategic. Businesses that appear similar at first glance often raise very different regulatory questions depending on how products, governance and future expansion plans are structured. Those decisions increasingly shape the regulatory engagement long before a formal submission is made.

Three trends that deserve closer attention

●      Institutional capital entering digital assets. As more regulated financial groups extend into virtual assets and institutional capital continues flowing into the sector, the operational, governance and disclosure expectations attached to a VARA or FSRA authorisation will keep rising in step.

●      AI changing supervisory expectations. As AI-enabled infrastructure moves from underwriting models to trading algorithms and client-facing tools, DIFC, ADGM and VARA are each treating that technology as a distinct supervisory question, layered on top of existing AML, cybersecurity and operational resilience requirements rather than replacing them.

●      Cross-regulator coordination. Firms operating across more than one of these jurisdictions, or considering passporting arrangements, increasingly need a regulatory assessment that accounts for VARA, the DFSA and the FSRA together, alongside the wider GCC's central banks, rather than treating each as a self-contained supervisory review.

Taken together, these three trends point in the same direction. The operational bar within each framework will keep rising, and the frameworks themselves are starting to behave less like three separate regimes and more like a connected system, one where a business model decision made for VARA has consequences for how the same firm is read by the DFSA or the FSRA. It is also worth noting that VARA's standard is already being referenced by regulators building their own virtual asset regimes elsewhere, which means firms built to that standard today are, by extension, better positioned for markets that adopt comparable frameworks tomorrow.

Beyond the data: the discipline behind a clean authorisation process

All of the growth above still depends on what a firm does once it decides on a jurisdiction. The regulators' own scrutiny has risen alongside the sophistication of who is applying, and the authorisation processes that move through cleanly consistently share a few traits: governance and documentation built in from the outset rather than retrofitted, senior leadership genuinely present in the regulatory dialogue, and a realistic view of how long a hybrid or first-of-kind operating structure takes to authorise. We have set out the mechanics of that process in detail elsewhere, including the jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction market entry journey and the most common causes of delay, in our guide to launching financial firms across DIFC, ADGM and the KSA and our strategic guide to GCC licensing. What is worth adding here is the why: this discipline matters more today than it did three years ago, precisely because the UAE's regulators, and the counterparties evaluating firms licensed by them, now have a global ranking and a much larger regulated peer group against which every new authorisation is implicitly measured.

Where this leaves firms planning UAE market entry

The question for any firm evaluating the UAE has shifted. The market's credibility is now settled by external data, the GFCI ranking, the DFSA's supervised entity count and VARA's licensed VASP total, rather than argument. The live question is sequencing: which of the three frameworks fits the intended business model, what the realistic authorisation timeline looks like given that model's complexity, particularly where it spans traditional finance and digital assets, and how early governance and documentation work needs to begin relative to a planned launch date.

j. awan & partners has advised on authorisations across the DFSA, VARA, ADGM's FSRA and other regional regulators, including recent engagements supporting a DIFC-based fintech's DFSA authorisation and a VARA Broker-Dealer licensing process for an institutional digital asset platform. For firms weighing a UAE go-to-market strategy, from first jurisdictional assessment through to post-licence supervision, the firm offers initial scoping conversations on a complimentary basis.

Firms entering the UAE today are participating in a financial market that is substantially different from the one that existed five years ago. Understanding the regulatory framework remains essential. Understanding the direction in which that framework is evolving increasingly shapes how successfully institutions establish, expand and compete within the region.

Frequently asked questions

Why did Dubai's ranking in the Global Financial Centres Index rise in 2026?

Dubai's climb to seventh place in the March 2026 GFCI reflects an independent, practitioner-driven assessment catching up to several years of underlying growth: a larger regulated financial services base, a fast-growing fintech and innovation cluster, and rising international confidence reflected in DIFC's and ADGM's own 2025 results. The ranking is produced independently by Z/Yen and the China Development Institute, entirely outside UAE government involvement.

Does a VARA virtual asset licence carry recognition outside Dubai?

A VARA licence authorises virtual asset activity in or from Dubai specifically, and firms operating elsewhere still need

separate recognition from the relevant local regulator. That said, VARA's framework is increasingly referenced by other regulators building their own virtual asset regimes, which means firms built to VARA's standard are often well positioned to meet comparable requirements as those frameworks come online elsewhere.

Are DIFC and ADGM competing with each other for the same firms?

The two centres overlap in parts of their offering but have developed distinct strengths: DIFC has built the region's deepest concentration of traditional banking, capital markets and wealth management activity, while ADGM has positioned itself around asset management, sovereign-adjacent capital and institutional digital assets. Most firms choose based on business model fit and target client base rather than viewing the two as interchangeable.

About j. awan & partners

j. awan & partners is the GCC compliance firm. Founded in the Dubai International Financial Centre in 2014, the firm advises regulated and applicant businesses across the region's financial centres, including DFSA, ADGM, VARA, CBUAE, SAMA, CBB, SCA and CMA, on licensing, compliance, governance and regulatory change. The firm serves clients in more than ninety countries across banking, asset and fund management, virtual assets and broader financial services.