United Arab Emirates

Jaywan has hit its 2026 issuance target six months early

Al Etihad Payments' Jaywan domestic scheme crossed 10m cards in issue by end-2025 against an originally mandated 30m-by-2026 target where progress had looked uncertain at the 8m end-2024 mark. The acceleration came from mandatory Jaywan-branded debit issuance on all new UAE bank accounts since March 2024; substitution of Visa/Mastercard on-us domestic volume is now the direct commercial consequence. The model — a CBUAE-subsidiary domestic scheme, mandatory issuance, co-badging only for international — is the Gulf transposition of the mada blueprint.

Digital Dirham retail go-live is the first GCC retail CBDC in production

CBUAE launched retail Digital Dirham to the public in March 2026 after a 2025 phased pilot with Emirates NBD, FAB, ADCB, Mashreq, ADIB, HSBC UAE and Standard Chartered UAE. The retail leg pairs with continuing wholesale mBridge participation, where CBUAE remains a core node alongside HKMA, Bank of Thailand and PBOC. The combination — live retail rail plus production-grade cross-border wholesale settlement — has no peer outside China. Operator implications are concrete: PSPs must wire Digital Dirham acceptance into UAE Pass and Aani QR within the 2026 window.

Outbound remittance is the structural anchor that makes UAE a corridor-design market

UAE workers sent AED 167bn (US$45.5bn) abroad in 2024 — the world's third-largest outbound corridor pool after the US and Saudi Arabia, against an 88% non-citizen resident population. The bilateral Aani-sarie corridor (live March 2026) and the upcoming Aani-UPI, Aani-Raast and Aani-InstaPay integrations turn what was a correspondent-bank cost structure into central-bank instant rails. LuLu, Botim, e& money and Wise UAE have already pushed retail corridor cost below 2% on India and Philippines routes; the regulatory roadmap suggests this is the floor, not the ceiling.

Aani's bilateral go-live with sarie (March 2026) is the first GCC retail instant corridor; India (UPI), Pakistan (Raast) and Philippines (InstaPay) integrations are on the 2026-27 roadmap. The design is central-bank-to-central-bank settlement at each leg, ISO 20022-native, with retail-friendly per-transaction caps. Providers that build payout connectivity into Aani ahead of each bilateral go-live capture the corridor before correspondent-bank pricing resets.

With Jaywan-default issuance compounding, domestic acquirers must rewire BIN routing so that on-us volume settles on Jaywan rails rather than Visa/Mastercard scheme rails. The economics differ materially — Jaywan domestic interchange and switching fees sit below the international-scheme equivalent — and the rebuild touches every ISV, terminal vendor and gateway in the country. AEP's certification queue is the gating constraint.

CBUAE's Payment Token Services Regulation (June 2024) provides a licensing framework for AED-pegged stablecoins; AE Coin (FAB + International Holding Company) moved from preliminary to full authorisation in February 2026. The regime turns AED-tokenisation from a regulatory question mark into a defined operating envelope; cross-border payment use cases — particularly outbound corridors where AED-stablecoin-to-USDC settlement bypasses correspondent-bank legs — are the obvious near-term application.