the United Arab Emirates

Card payments, mostly contactless, are standard in UAE shops, malls and restaurants, and phone wallets such as Apple Pay, Google Pay and Samsung Pay work at NFC terminals. Cash is still accepted, especially for small purchases. Two domestic options are rolling out through Al Etihad Payments, a subsidiary of the Central Bank of the UAE: Aani, which supports QR-code payments from bank apps, and Jaywan, the national card scheme. Jaywan debit and prepaid cards began issuing in July 2026 and are accepted at point-of-sale terminals, online, at ATMs and in digital wallets.

The UAE e-commerce market reached AED 32.3 billion in 2024, according to a report by the Dubai South e-commerce zone EZDubai and Euromonitor International, as reported by the state news agency WAM. Major platforms include Amazon.ae, noon, Namshi, Talabat and Careem. The same 2025 industry survey that tracked cash on delivery found that 21% of UAE consumers shopped online daily, up from 5% in 2020. Aani had more than 80,000 merchants enrolled by February 2025. Shoppers expect dirham pricing, fast local delivery and a choice of card, wallet, BNPL and cash-on-delivery options.

The Central Bank of the UAE (CBUAE) licenses and supervises payment service providers under its Retail Payment Services and Card Schemes Regulation, issued in 2021, which sets four licence categories and covers services including merchant acquiring, payment aggregation, payment account and instrument issuance, fund transfers, payment initiation and account information. The CBUAE’s 2024 Payment Token Services Regulation restricts crypto payments: merchants may not accept foreign payment tokens for ordinary goods and services, and dirham payment tokens may only be issued by CBUAE-licensed, UAE-incorporated issuers. The Dubai International Financial Centre and Abu Dhabi Global Market are financial free zones with their own regulators (DFSA and FSRA). Al Etihad Payments, a CBUAE subsidiary, operates Aani and Jaywan.

The latest World Bank Global Findex data for the UAE are from 2021, when 86% of adults had an account, 69% owned a debit card, 27% owned a credit card and 75% had made a digital payment. Aani had 1.5 million enrolled users and 57 participating licensed financial institutions by February 2025, including licensed exchange houses as well as banks.