Enterprise Risk Management
Continues to serve as a central engine to manage uncertainties and drive growth, performance and resilience.
2025 Story:
Dubai’s growth momentum continued surge in 2025; with strong economic growth, record tourism numbers, rising population and surging real estate transactions supported by strong infrastructure spending and business friendly initiatives. Salik is a core pillar of Dubai’s critical infrastructure, playing a vital role in ensuring the city remains seamlessly connected, accessible, and operational at all times. As Dubai’s exclusive toll operator, Salik is aware of and committed to its obligation to provide seamless, barrier‑free, uninterrupted motion through its ten automatic toll gates running through the heart of the Emirate, with over 850 million trips recorded during 2025.
Through 2025, Salik continued to rise Beyond and Above its primary role as Dubai’s exclusive toll operator. Salik continued on its growth trajectory by diversifying its revenue streams and establishing itself as a Mobility Partner for both the Government and Private entities within Dubai and beyond.
Managing complexity, change and uncertainty are part and parcel of day‑to‑day decision making for Salik, through its Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) framework, which continues to serve as the central engine for all risk management activities across the organisation.
2025 heralded lots of such complex scenarios which included implementation of variable tolling, expansion of our partnership with LIVA Insurance, transformation of the Salik eco‑system as a mobility services enabler through its e‑Wallet for parking services payment and beyond. Risk Management focus generally revolved around ensuring Salik’s underlying technology remains resilient to the changes, disruption‑free operations of the tolling systems, successful deployment of new and complex Mobility Services, including ensuring continued financial success of these initiatives.
The Framework:
Salik’s ERM seamlessly aligns with the ‘Three Lines of Defense’ Governance model, with the Board of Directors providing executive decisions on the key risks faced by Salik. In addition, its Audit Committee, which has visibility and oversight over the Risk Management and control activities across Salik, provides assurance on all the Governance practices adopted by Salik.
Salik’s integrated approach to ERM, business continuity management and crisis management underpins its ability not only to respond to operational disruptions but to deliver on its long‑term growth objectives. Context – based risk appetite statements have been approved by Salik’s Board of Directors, setting out limits on acceptable risks for all business units to follow in pursuit of opportunities and growth. These support risk‑based decision‑making, such as mitigation, acceptance and escalation, at all levels within the organisation.
Salik has designed and adopted its risk management practices at all levels as an integrated tool for decision‑making; considering strategic and other emerging risks, operational risks and project‑specific risks.
Salik’s ERM Policy drives common language and protocols for identifying, documenting and communicating risks. The deployment of the ERM Policy across the organisation at all levels ensures identification and management of risks, within the overarching appetite levels set out by the Board of Directors. These risks, along with their mitigation plans across all levels of the organisation, are monitored by the management level committee established at Salik. This ensures that a cross‑functional management team is always on top of all risk‑management activities, including critical vendor and third‑party relationships, driving Salik’s readiness and resilience to disruptions across value chains. Salik’s business continuity management system, based on a BCM Policy approved by the Board of Directors, ensures that business impact analyses are regularly carried out. Furthermore, business continuity plans are prepared and tested to ensure resilient operations.
In 2025, as Salik moves ahead with achieving inorganic revenue growth and enhancing shareholder value. The ERM Framework was enhanced to include investment‑oriented risk appetite statements and the process for embedding risk‑based decision making for scouting, finalizing and operationalizing inorganic growth and investments.
Risk Culture:
At Salik, we recognize that risk management is not an exact science, but the ability of decision makers to have the foresight to understand and manage uncertainties affecting Salik’s Objectives. This capability building is not milestone but a journey, as prevailing risk landscape continues to evolve. Salik’s Board of Directors are also part of this process by participating in holistic evaluation and learning programs, which include ERM and emerging risk areas.
At the Management Level, ERM function supports the learning and education through both formal training and awareness sessions and mentoring of Risk Owners in understanding identification, evaluation, mitigation and escalation of risks. The Board of Directors approved Risk appetite form the basis for understanding the risk limits to considered by Risk Owners in the decision making processes during development and approval of new products, services and strategic initiatives.
The performance evaluation and remuneration frameworks established within Salik incorporate indicators which include the ability of Risk Owners to manage their respective key risks. As an illustration these indicators include; Tolling Systems Availability, Technology or process outages, success of revenue diversification initiatives, etc, all of which are the primary risks managed by Salik.
Operational Risk Management:
At Salik, we have not only designed technologies with built‑in continuity capabilities, but have developed an organisational culture where risk management, business continuity, response and recovery protocols, and financial resilience are embedded in everything we do. Implementing a culture and philosophy of reliability and resilience at all levels of the organisation has helped the Company to realize virtually no customer‑facing systems downtime and close to zero revenue losses.
Salik’s best‑in‑class roadside tolling technology is designed to deliver continuity and resilience. It was built on high‑availability and high‑redundancy designs that produce 99%+ uptimes across all toll gates as well as back‑end processes. Disaster recovery plans support the fundamentally robust technical framework, which in 2025 continued to support seamless notification, monitoring, communication, resolution of incidents and resuming services.
Emerging Risks:
Emerging Risks are also discussed on a yearly basis to understand the proximity, materiality and knock‑on effects of these risks on Salik’s Strategy and Operations. In 2025, Salik specifically discussed and drilled down on the following Emerging Risk Triggers, assessed their knock‑on effects and re‑ascertained and enhanced the existing control measures and mitigation actions.
| Emerging Risk Triggers | Knock‑on effects | Salik’s Risk Management Approach |
|---|---|---|
| AI Adoption | Readiness & Privacy concerns |
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| Extreme Weather Events | Telecommunication, utilities or infrastructure failure |
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| Environmental & Societal Reporting | Understanding and Readiness; Evolving regulatory requirements |
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| Mis‑information & Dis‑information | Salik targeted campaigns Financial Frauds |
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| Complex cyber attacks | Failures / Disruption / Data breaches due to cybercrime Supply chain exposures |
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| Geopolitical events and Economic Downturn | Impact on toll and other mobility services revenue – which skew towards positive impact |
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Aggregation & Reporting:
Top risks affecting Salik’s ability to achieve its strategy and ensure disruption‑free operations are aggregated and communicated to the Salik Board of Directors, having already been reviewed and endorsed by Salik’s management team and CEO. The top risks are also independently endorsed by Salik’s Audit Committee. This exercise is carried out on a quarterly basis to ensure that the Salik Board of Directors is aware of and informed of the top risks for their timely attention and direction.
Maturity Journey:
The Risk Maturity Model (RMM) adopted by Salik continues to support enhancement of the culture and maturity of its ERM practices. The Risk Maturity Model (RMM) serves as a benchmark of practices against an umbrella framework that covers ISO 31000, OCEG Red Book and COSO standards. We continue to follow through on the action plans which support the overall maturity improvement.
ERM, serving as the central engine for all risk management activities. was also audited by an External Certification Body, as part of the ISO 9001, 14001 and 45001 Integrated Management Systems Certification in 2025 and has contributed to Salik being certified against these International Standards.
ERM is an essential pillar of Salik’s Corporate Governance framework by driving transparency, and communication among both internal and external stakeholders. It is an enabler of long‑term success for Salik evidenced by its financial performance, credit rating, growth, investor trust and awards & accolades received for its Governance practices, which included in 2025 the following:
- Global Good Governance (3G) Excellence Award for Advocacy & Commitment to Corporate Governance by Cambridge IFA
- Golden Peacock Global Award for Excellence in Corporate Governance by the Institute of Directors, India
As a conclusion, at Salik, we manage risk to ensure success and long‑term value for its stakeholders.