There is a difference between a jurisdiction that welcomes capital and a jurisdiction that goes looking for it. Dubai has spent the better part of a decade doing the former rather well. This week it made clear that it now intends to do the latter, and it has recruited one of Switzerland’s oldest private banks to help.

Dubai’s Department of Economy and Tourism has signed a strategic agreement with Julius Baer (Middle East) Ltd., the regional arm of the Zurich-headquartered wealth manager. The stated purpose is straightforward enough. The two parties intend to build structured pathways for international investors, business owners, family offices and private clients who are considering Dubai as a base. In practice, it means that when a family in Zurich, Singapore or São Paulo asks its private banker where it should be looking next, there is now a formal channel running directly from that conversation into Dubai’s economic development apparatus.

For families already advised on cross-border structuring, this is worth reading closely. It is not a marketing announcement. It is an indication of where the emirate believes its next decade of growth is coming from.

What the Numbers Are Actually Saying

The context behind the agreement is more compelling than the agreement itself.

At the end of 2025, the Dubai International Financial Centre was home to 1,289 family-related entities, an increase of sixty one per cent on the prior year. Foundations established by DIFC-based families reached 1,115 over the same period, up sixty six per cent year on year. These are not incremental figures. A jurisdiction does not see two thirds growth in foundation formation because of favourable weather and good restaurants. It sees it because families have concluded that the legal architecture is sound enough to hold assets they intend to pass on.

The wider economic picture supports the same reading. Dubai has now ranked as the world’s leading destination for greenfield foreign direct investment projects for five consecutive years, and the emirate recorded GDP growth of 5.4 per cent in 2025. Capital is not arriving out of sentiment. It is arriving because the underlying economy is expanding and because the regulatory environment has matured to the point where sophisticated families can structure around it with confidence.

Julius Baer, for its part, brings roughly CHF 547 billion in assets under management as at the end of June 2026, along with a presence in more than twenty five countries and sixty locations. That is a substantial global funnel to be pointed in one direction.

Why Private Banks Are Now Part of the Migration Story

For a long time, the wealth migration conversation was dominated by immigration advisors and property developers. Residency was sold as a lifestyle product. The private banking relationship, if it existed at all, tended to come afterwards.

That sequence has inverted. Families relocating today are increasingly making the banking and structuring decision first and the property decision second. The reason is practical. A residency permit does not organize succession. A villa does not solve for reporting obligations across three jurisdictions. What resolves those problems is a properly constituted holding structure, a bank that understands cross-border families, and a governance framework that survives the founder.

Julius Baer’s leadership has been candid that geopolitical complexity is part of what is driving this. Their view, expressed around the agreement, is that instability elsewhere has strengthened rather than weakened the case for Dubai, because the emirate offers institutional credibility and a clear long-term economic direction at a moment when several traditional hubs offer neither.

We would put it slightly differently. Families are not moving to Dubai because everywhere else has become unworkable. They are moving because Dubai has become genuinely workable, and because the cost of maintaining a single-jurisdiction life has risen sharply.

The Structural Question Most Families Get Wrong

Here is where the practical work begins, and where a great many families still stumble.

Establishing presence in Dubai is not difficult. Establishing the right presence in Dubai requires judgement. A family that arrives with a mainland trading company, a personal property portfolio held in individual names, and no succession instrument has technically relocated. It has not restructured. When the founder dies, the assets sit exposed to default succession rules, the operating business has no separation from the family balance sheet, and the next generation inherits a set of problems rather than a set of instruments.

The alternative is a deliberate architecture. A DIFC Foundation sitting at the top as the ownership layer, holding companies beneath it segregating operating risk from passive assets, special purpose vehicles for individual real estate holdings, and a DIFC Will alongside it to govern anything held outside the structure. Each element is unremarkable on its own. Assembled correctly, they produce something that most families genuinely want and few actually have, which is a structure that continues to function without the founder present to hold it together.

The surge in DIFC foundation registrations suggests that this message is landing. The number of families who have implemented properly, as opposed to registered an entity and stopped, is smaller than the headline figure implies.

What This Means If You Are Considering the Move

The DET and Julius Baer agreement should be read as a signal about direction rather than a change in the rules. Nothing about the DIFC regime, the Golden Visa framework or the corporate tax position has changed as a result of it. What has changed is the level of institutional commitment behind attracting long-term capital, and that commitment tends to be followed by further refinement of the regimes themselves.

For families weighing the decision, the practical implication is timing. Jurisdictions are at their most accommodating when they are competing for capital. Dubai is competing openly and confidently at present. The families who structure now, while the regulatory environment is being actively improved and while the administrative apparatus is oriented towards welcoming them, tend to secure better outcomes than those who arrive once a jurisdiction is comfortable and no longer needs to try.

The second implication concerns sequencing. A partnership between an economic development body and a private bank creates a pathway into the market. It does not create a plan for your family. The pathway will introduce you to the jurisdiction. It will not tell you whether your Omani operating business should sit inside or outside the Foundation, whether your children should hold branch foundations of their own, or how your existing exposure in a treaty jurisdiction interacts with a UAE tax residency certificate. Those questions require advice that is independent of any single product.

How Knightsbridge Group Can Help

Knightsbridge Group advises internationally mobile families on the full arc of establishing in the UAE, from residency and corporate formation through to DIFC Foundation architecture, succession instruments and long-term legacy planning. We work alongside private banks, tax counsel and family offices rather than in competition with them, because the value of what we do lies in coordinating the pieces rather than selling any one of them.

If you are assessing Dubai as a base for your family or your capital, we would welcome the conversation.