Dubai's Department of Finance launches strategic plan to strengthen financial stability

Emirate aims to use 'best smart and innovative financial systems' to improve quality of life for community

The Dubai Skyline. The emirate is among the fastest growing business and financial hubs in the Middle East. Getty Images

Dubai's Department of Finance (DoF) has launched a strategic plan that aims to boost the financial stability of the emirate and bolster its position as a global finance hub.

The Strategic Plan 2026 aims to achieve its objectives through the fair and efficient distribution of the emirate's resources, using the "best smart and innovative financial systems and practices to achieve happiness and quality of life for the community", the Dubai Media Office said in a tweet on Monday.

The new 2026 strategy aims to achieve a set of objectives associated with the Dubai Strategy 2030 project, state-run news agency Wam reported on Tuesday.

"We appreciate and value the achievements made by all organisational units during the past five years, which was the lifespan of the 2021 Strategy," Wam quoted Abdulrahman Al Saleh, director general of DoF, as saying.

"DoF assumed its responsibilities in recovering from the pandemic and was able to advance government financial matter and quickly restore it to vitality, while hosting the Expo 2020 Dubai, which welcomed the world to the emirate, despite the crisis challenges," he said.

As the direct supervisory authority of all government financial affairs in Dubai, DoF is embarking on its next five-year journey with specific objectives, Mr Al Saleh said.

"DoF's new strategy is based on a vision of 'global leadership and innovative financial sustainability', with six corporate values put in place to enable us further develop government financial business, to achieve six ambitious strategic objectives that take the future needs into account," Wam quoted Jasim Al Zarooni, director of DoF's strategy and corporate performance division as saying.

"Our mission for the 2026 Strategy is to achieve financial sustainability to proactively support the leading position of Dubai through the fair and efficient distribution of the emirate's resources," he said.

The economy of Dubai, the commercial, financial and trading centre of the Middle East, has rebounded strongly from the pandemic-driven slowdown. The emirate is undertaking several multibillion-dollar infrastructure and other schemes across sectors as it pursues the Dubai 2040 Urban Master Plan.

In January, the Government of Dubai unveiled the 2022 to 2024 budget of the emirate that allocates Dh181 billion ($49.28bn) of expenditure, including Dh60bn set aside for this year.

Dubai also took the top spot globally for attracting foreign direct investment projects in the financial services sector in 2021, according to a report published in July.

Led by the Dubai International Financial Centre, the emirate attracted 58 FDI projects in the sector, totalling Dh926.2 million last year, beating major financial cities such as London, Singapore, New York and Paris, a report published by the Dubai Investment Development Agency (Dubai FDI), an agency of the Department of Economy and Tourism, showed.