Why DIFC Week matters

Dubai special trick is worth billions. While regional and indeed international peers invariably decide to stake a claim to an area of business they would like to make their own, few plans ever get much further than the governmental strategy meeting, Mckinsey report and press release that flops to the newsroom floor like a slippery wet fish.

Dubai, however, has the ability to take the most competitive and attractive industries and make them its own - tourism, logistics, and now finance, perhaps the biggest ask of them all.

The DIFC, opened for business in 2004, has as its stated aim to "bridge the gap between existing financial centres of London and New York in the West and Hong Kong and Tokyo in the East". In other words, its opening gambit was to take advantage of its global positioning to help the world's financial system keep churning 24/7.

In addition it wanted to "service a region with the largest untapped emerging market for financial services."

In other words: "Rather than let GCC money - of which there is plenty now oil is verging on $100 a barrel - slosh its way into London, park it instead in a GCC country."

The measure of Dubai's success can be seen in that it has already eclipsed Bahrain, the region's historical financial centre, at least in the mind of the world's financial community. No one talks of moving to Manama. Everyone talk of moving to Dubai. And often in excited, breathless tones.

While reality may take time to catch up to vision, there is no doubt that this is a strategy that has worked time and time again for Dubai - and all the evidence is that it is working again.

Should Dubai topple Bahrain, and perhaps even Singapore, it will be a glittering prize indeed. A financial centre is worth billions directly, and billions again indirectly in the services that grow up to support it. And don't forget the highly paid employees that would invest their capital into the emirate.

But Dubai needs to keep working that PR, needs to keep generating news, and needs to be seen as more than just a place for fancy real estate. For Dubai and the DIFC to really succeed it needs to be seen to be as a place of original ideas, sparkling people, an idea originator and thought leader of its own.

Step forward DIFC Week.

In many ways DIFC Week is positioning itself as the Davos of the Middle East. It wants to attract the region's thought leaders, and combine them in a hopefully exciting mix of global thought leaders.

It wants to do this for two reasons:

1. To transfer leading edge global ideas to the region.
2. Plant seeds in the minds of those that visit that Dubai is the next London or New York.

To put it the way the DIFC does, it wants to "turn the financial agenda on its head" and be a forum "not about what the industry is talking about today, but what it will be discussing tomorrow."

With the likes of Dr Omar Bin Sulaiman, Steven Levitt, Larry Summers, Jeffrey Sachs, David Eldon, Robert Shiller and HE Dr Mohamed Khalfan bin Kharbash taking the podium it has every chance of doing exactly that.

'Dubai topples London as Financial Centre of the World'. You heard it here first.

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