Banking in the UAE in 2025: Why Account Opening Remains a Strategic Hurdle
The UAE continues to thrive as a global destination for private capital, investment platforms, and cross-border business structures. With the Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC) and Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM) attracting record numbers of family offices and holding companies, the jurisdiction’s appeal is undisputed. But behind the growth headlines, one issue continues to challenge new entrants: bank account opening.
Despite regulatory reforms, increased oversight, and digital initiatives, opening a business account in the UAE remains, in many cases, slow, opaque, and risk-driven. In 2025, this is no longer just an administrative inconvenience—it’s a strategic consideration in corporate planning.
The Bottleneck Behind the Boom
While the UAE’s financial free zones are well-organized and internationally credible, the practical process of opening a bank account—especially for holding companies, SPVs, and new family office setups—often lags behind the jurisdiction’s business-friendly reputation.
Applicants routinely face:
- Long onboarding times, often exceeding 8–12 weeks for newly incorporated entities
- Requests for extensive documentation, including audited financials from unrelated jurisdictions
- Unclear or shifting internal bank criteria, particularly around UBO residency, business activity, or source of wealth
- In some cases, unexplained rejections after prolonged engagement
Why It’s Still Difficult
The challenges are rooted in risk-based decision-making, rather than a lack of infrastructure. UAE regulators have made major progress in improving financial supervision, but local banks continue to exercise discretion when onboarding structures they perceive as passive, opaque, or high-risk.
Common triggers for delays or rejection include:
- Non-resident UBOs (especially from countries subject to additional scrutiny)
- Complex ownership layers or holding company chains
- Vague or unsubstantiated business activity
- Structures without local substance (e.g., no staff, no office, no license beyond a formation certificate)
Even legitimate clients—such as international investors setting up holding vehicles or family offices—can be affected if they don’t present their case clearly.
This is where early-stage planning and support makes a difference. At Bolster Group, we regularly assist clients in preparing full onboarding files, pre-emptively addressing risk flags, and selecting banks whose profiles and expectations align with the client’s structure.
The Role of Regulatory Developments
In 2024 and 2025, the UAE introduced a range of banking compliance reforms aimed at enhancing transparency and international trust. These include:
- Stricter enforcement of UBO reporting and economic substance rules
- Alignment with FATF recommendations to address remaining grey list concerns
- Increased regulatory expectations for ongoing account monitoring, especially for low-transaction or dormant accounts
These reforms are necessary and welcomed by the international community—but they have also made UAE banks more cautious in onboarding non-standard entities.
For clients, this means that licensing a company is no longer the finish line—it’s just the first step. Without a workable banking strategy, even the most well-structured entity can’t operate effectively.
Emerging Compliance Frameworks & Tech-Driven Risk Models
The UAE is embracing Open Finance and API banking, which adds efficiency but also new layers of data governance and transaction risk oversight.
Simultaneously, banks are enhancing RegTech frameworks to detect KYC anomalies and improve transaction monitoring—a push driven by national AML strategies into 2027.
As part of this shift, the Central Bank is applying more stringent oversight to virtual assets, real estate-related transactions, and financial institutions deemed most vulnerable to illicit flows. The result: onboarding teams are empowered to ask more questions—raising the bar for compliance preparedness.
Practical Strategies That Work
While there’s no one-size-fits-all solution, we’ve seen several strategies that significantly improve banking outcomes in the UAE:
- Ensuring clear business activity is stated on license and in documentation
- Maintaining local presence—through a physical office, real employees, or at minimum, demonstrable operations
- Providing high-quality source-of-wealth documentation and corporate history
- Preparing for in-person meetings and ongoing relationship management with banks
- Choosing the right bank profile—some institutions are more open to SPVs or passive structures than others
Bolster Group helps clients tailor their UAE structure with banking in mind from day one, whether through DIFC, ADGM, or mainland incorporation. We also maintain relationships with multiple banking partners to help match clients with institutions aligned to their needs and risk profile.