On 4 August 2026 the UAE Ministry of Economy and Tourism (MoET) held a technical workshop with 90 representatives from 33 federal and local licensing authorities and free zones. The aim: deepen integration of the national digital business registry "Growth" — which now classifies more than 4,000 economic activities — into one search point for licensing, counterparty checks and due diligence across the country.
What happened at the 4 August workshop
A federal workshop on 4 August 2026 aligned 33 UAE licensing bodies around one digital business registry. Ninety representatives from federal ministries, local government entities and free zones met at MoET to work through the technical side of integration — pushing licensing data, factory information and corporate financial records into a shared platform.
H.E. Abdulaziz Al Nuaimi, Assistant Undersecretary for Entrepreneurship and Economic Affairs Regulatory Sector, framed the scale: "The platform classifies more than 4,000 economic activities and supports government entities, businesses and investors with accurate data for decision-making."
According to MoET, the workshop is part of a phased rollout that began with the launch of NER "Growth" in October 2024. The first coordination workshop in January 2025 gathered 30 participants. This one — 90. Three times the room in eighteen months.
How NER "Growth" works
NER "Growth" is the UAE's federal business registry launched on 1 October 2024 — one lookup point for every commercial licence across the seven emirates. At launch the platform already carried 1.5 million active and cancelled licences and connected 46 entities, including 34 federal and local government bodies, with input from 180 experts.
Two design choices sit at the core. First, a single Economic Registration Number (ERN) replaces the scattered local trade licence numbers businesses used to juggle across emirates. Second, activities follow the international ISIC4 classification — the same taxonomy banks, auditors and cross-border regulators already read. The service is publicly listed on the national portal u.ae under Business Services.
For founders still mapping out the process, we cover the mechanics in a separate guide on how to open a company in the UAE step by step — licence choice, activity codes, documents, timing.
What changes for UAE business
Faster licensing, easier counterparty checks, cleaner due diligence — that's the near-term shift once integration deepens. Instead of hopping between emirate portals to verify a supplier or partner, a compliance officer can run one search and get a verified record straight from the licensing authority.
For investors, the pay-off is verified data from the primary government source rather than aggregators or manual filings. For entrepreneurs, licence registration and renewal move closer to a straight-through digital process — less paper, less back-and-forth between the licensing authority and MoET.
The ISIC4 classification is also a quiet win for banking. Know-your-business (KYB) checks, financial reporting and cross-border operations get simpler when the activity code in your UAE licence matches the one a bank in London or Frankfurt already uses.
Free zones and mainland — now in one registry
For the first time, mainland trade licences and free zone licences sit inside the same federal search. Until now the market was fragmented: each free zone ran its own portal, each emirate its own economic department, and reconciling a company's status across them was a manual job.
The workshop line-up reflects the shift. Thirty-three federal and local licensing authorities and free zones — not a partial slice, but the full stack — are pulling data into the same platform. Where to set up still matters, and we walk through the trade-off in free zone vs mainland: which to choose in 2026. The choice, though, will no longer punish you with two separate paper trails.
What next
The workshop signals a broader UAE course: fewer manual steps, more machine-readable data, stronger investor confidence in verified public records. According to MoET, the direction is a single federal source of truth for who is licensed to do what — and where.
For business owners and consultants working in the country, the practical read is simple. The registry is real, the coverage is widening, and the way a UAE counterparty gets verified in 2027 will not look like the way it was done in 2023.
