Some endorsements carry more weight for how reluctantly they arrive. Accepting an award for 25 years of building DMCC into the world’s leading international business district, Ahmed Bin Sulayem, Executive Chairman and CEO of the Dubai Multi Commodities Centre, admitted he’d had to depart from the notes in front of him after hearing the speeches ahead of him. What followed was not a scripted tribute, but a recollection, and near the top of it was Jignesh Shah.
Not on a List of Partners
Bin Sulayem was straightforward about how significant the DMCC–Jignesh Shah connection was, at the time it began. Establishing a Gold and Commodities Exchange in the Middle East wasn’t a case of working down a list of CEOs or partners eager to sign on. As he put it to the room, if you’re already an established CEO, why would you join a startup somewhere in the Middle East? Most wouldn’t. Shah did, not because he needed the platform, Bin Sulayem suggested, but because he came with an entrepreneur’s mindset that made the risk irrelevant to him. This mindset of Shah eventually culminated into the establishment and the success of Dubai Gold and Commodities Exchange (DGCX)
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The Line That Defined the Tribute
The praise crystallised into a single admission: Bin Sulayem said that Shah’s imagination is bigger than his own. It’s a striking thing for the head of an organisation that grew from 28 member companies in 2003 to more than 26,000 across 180 countries to say that about anyone. He illustrated it concretely, while DMCC and its partners were still working through products and contracts for the exchange they were building together, Shah was already talking about establishing more exchanges around the world, thinking several moves past the conversation actually taking place.
A Named Legacy, Still Running
Bin Sulayem pointed to the Dubai Gold and Commodities Exchange, DGCX, as living proof of that partnership, its currency pairs, the continued presence of the Indian rupee among them, and the possibility of listing crypto derivatives next, all part of a platform that traces its lineage back to the entrepreneurial instinct he credited to Shah at the outset.
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Recognition, Not Rehearsal
What made the tribute land was its informality. Bin Sulayem said he recognised Jignesh Shah from a video played earlier in the event, then found himself looking behind him on stage, happy to see him there in person. It wasn’t a line written for the occasion, it read, and was delivered, as recognition between two people who had built something together when neither the market nor the region gave them much reason to expect it would work. Twenty-five years and one Executive Chairman’s unscripted aside later, it clearly did.
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