The CEO of Dubai Business Registration and Licensing Corporation (DBLC), Ahmad Khalifa Al Qaizi Al Falasi, has laid out the results of Dubai's digital business-registration reform in an exclusive Gulf News interview (3 September 2026): 58,337 new licences in H1 2026, 173,652 renewals and an 84% jump in issued licences across 2023–2025 versus 2020–2022. Opening a corporate bank account via the Dubai Unified Licence has fallen from around 90 days to around three. Next up — the Dubai Investor Register and AI on the Invest in Dubai platform.
What the DBLC CEO said
DBLC — a unit of the Dubai Department of Economy and Tourism (DET) — was established in 2023 by Dubai Emirate Law No. 6 of 2023 as a single point of entry into business registration and licensing. The one-stop-shop mandate targets three long-standing pain points for investors: fragmented data across agencies, duplicated procedures on federal, local and free-zone tiers, and slow approvals.
In the CEO's words, ‘Dubai's business registration and licensing ecosystem has moved from a collection of isolated services to a single, integrated digital environment built around the investor, not the process.’ DBLC's mandate in 2026 has been broadened: beyond issuing licences, the corporation is now responsible for regulation, policy drafting and bridging the public and private sides into a single digital channel — the Invest in Dubai platform.
Key numbers for the first half of 2026
58,337 new licences — issued between January and June 2026 across Dubai's mainland and the free zones connected through DBLC. 173,652 licences — renewed over the same period. In total, more than 230,000 licensing transactions in the six months.
+84% — the increase in issued business licences over 2023–2025 versus 2020–2022. DBLC uses this three-year window to measure the effect of the digital reform launched with the corporation's creation in 2023.
From ~90 to ~3 days — the reduction in the average time to open a corporate bank account in Dubai for flows integrated with the Dubai Unified Licence (DUL, launched in 2025). The logic is straightforward: banks pull verified company data straight from the DBLC registry rather than collecting it again from the client. Government of Dubai Media Office releases from November 2025 quoted a more conservative headline — from 65 to 5 days; the CEO's newer figure of ‘about 90 → about 3 days’ applies to fully integrated flows.
What is coming: Investor Register and AI
Two initiatives DBLC flags as the next step are the Dubai Investor Register (a unified registry of investors in the emirate) and an expansion of AI on the Invest in Dubai platform. Per the CEO, the AI push should move the platform ‘from a transaction-processing tool into a system that can guide investors’: suggesting the next step and the relevant licences or services at each stage of a business — from formation to scaling. No launch date for the Investor Register was disclosed in the interview; it is described as ‘developing’.
What this means for businesses and where to focus
For readers planning or already running a company in Dubai, the fresh DBLC numbers carry three practical signals.
Registration is getting faster — the requirements are not getting softer. Faster does not mean simpler: digitalisation compresses timelines but does not remove bank KYC/AML checks, beneficial-owner structure requirements or tax registration obligations (VAT, corporate tax). The overall step-by-step framework for opening a company in the UAE holds — what changes is the speed at which the stages clear, not the set of checks themselves.
Choice of location still matters. DBLC covers Dubai's mainland and the connected free zones of the emirate. The free zone or mainland decision in 2026 is still driven by business model: access to the local market and government contracts, tax regimes, office and shareholder rules. Faster licensing is a plus for the mainland option, but it does not settle the strategic ‘where should we sit’ question.
A single digital environment tightens compliance. DBLC's data-linking with banks, regulators and federal registries means that ‘holes in the structure’ now surface faster and from one console. Companies where current data (address, beneficial owners, activities) do not line up across registries would be wise to reconcile before a mismatch is flagged by an automated check on a renewal or a bank transaction.
Primary source and how to verify
The primary source is the exclusive interview with DBLC CEO Ahmad Khalifa Al Qaizi Al Falasi in Gulf News (Business section, 3 September 2026). The legal basis for DBLC is Dubai Emirate Law No. 6 of 2023 ‘Establishing the Dubai Business Registration and Licensing Corporation’, published on the Dubai Department of Legal Affairs portal (dlp.dubai.gov.ae). Updates on the Dubai Unified Licence and its bank integration are published by the Government of Dubai Media Office (mediaoffice.ae), with the last major releases dated to late 2025. DBLC's status as a unit of DET is confirmed by the UAE federal portal u.ae, ‘Starting a business’ section.
For Garant readers: Dubai's digital registration reform continues to accelerate the ‘front end’ — opening a company and a corporate account. The ‘back end’ — tax, compliance, bank KYC, reporting — remains an area where short timelines at entry do not replace clean documentation and structure. The DBLC speed-up is a chance to save weeks on entry, not a licence to skip stages.
Primary source: exclusive interview with CEO of Dubai Business Registration and Licensing Corporation (DBLC) Ahmad Khalifa Al Qaizi Al Falasi — Gulf News, 3 September 2026. Legal basis: Dubai Emirate Law No. 6 of 2023. Cross-check: mediaoffice.ae (Government of Dubai Media Office), u.ae (UAE federal portal), dlp.dubai.gov.ae (Dubai Department of Legal Affairs).
