Company Registry Spotlight: Dubai

The UAE’s National Economic Register is a federal platform which aims to adopt the tools of the knowledge-based economy to provide accurate, comprehensive, and instant data on the existing economic licences in Dubai and the wider United Arab Emirates.

The Register is designed to serve stakeholders from a range of backgrounds, including government entities, businesses, investors, and consumers from both inside and outside the country.

For Dubai, The United Arab Emirates Ministry of Economy’s National Economic Register can be used and the register can be accessed here: https://ner.economy.ae/Search_By_BN.aspx

The registry is open to the public, and no account creation is required to access the information. You have multiple options to search for businesses, including:

• Business Name (in Arabic or English)
• Local ED License Number
• CBLS Federal Reservation Number

Additionally, you can explore the directory by browsing business activities.

The UAE National Economic Register provides useful incorporation documents and corporate data on a variety of entity types. The main entity types listed in the registry are:

• Limited Liability Company
• Company limited by shares
• Corporations
• Partnerships

Searching for a business via its name, licence number, and CBLS number will display the business’s license details, this includes the following:

• CBLS and BL Local Numbers.
• Trading name in both Arabic and English.
• Establishment and expiry date for registration.
• Business description in both Arabic and English.
• Relevant economic department and registration branch.
• Contact details.

Searching the directory via business activity will display:

• BA No. ISIC (International Standard Industrial Classification of All Economic Activities)
• The Business Activity in Arabic and English.
• The Business Activity Description in both Arabic and English.

In addition to these documents, the registry offers valuable data on the company itself, its officers, and its shareholders. This extensive coverage ensures that information on a wide range of corporate structures is readily available.

Dubai has at least 652,885 private sector companies registered with various licensing authorities. This accounts to 46% of the UAE’s total licensed businesses.

Dubai issued 72,152 new business licences in 2021 alone, compared to 42,729 in the previous year. This represents an annual growth of 69%. Of these new businesses, about 60% were “professional” entities, with around 40% classed as “commercial” entities. 37% of the new licenses went to sole establishment companies, 26% to limited liability companies, and 13% were civil companies.

Financial institutions and regulated companies across the world rely on official company registries to ensure accurate Know Your Business (KYB) procedures.

The information sourced from official company registries can be used to verify clients, suppliers, investors, and partners. This can give compliance teams peace of mind that the companies they are dealing with are who they say they are, and that they are operating legally.

Though most official company registries are open to the public, accessing multiple company registries manually can be highly time-consuming task for compliance officers. Every country tends to use different systems to display different types of data. There are often language barriers to contend with too. Not all official registries offer instant translations like the UAE’s National Economic Register.

It’s for this reason that many compliance teams depend on automated KYB to streamline compliance processes. Real-time access to company registries also has the advantage of providing details on any newly incorporated entities. These may not be listed in traditional corporate information databases, which tend to be static and only updated occasionally.

Know Your Customer can automatically access company registries and retrieve any required official documents or data. This can significantly simplify the verification process.

With Know Your Customer, you get fast access to real-time information from Dubai’s National Economic Register, along with standardised access to local registries in over 130 countries across the world. And you get this dependable access through a single platform or API.

With our platform’s AI and machine learning capabilities, we can rapidly analyse huge amounts of company registry data, to give you reliably accurate and efficient data verification. And through automating the verification process, you can save huge amounts of time while still meeting your compliance obligations.