The UAE’s Instant Payment Rail Won the Wallet and Missed the Till

Aani reached 12.5 million registered users, 74 licensed institutions and 774,000 merchants by April 2026, then processed 25,000 phone number transfers a day

AsiaPresswire – Twelve and a half million registered users. Seventy four licensed institutions. Eighty five percent of the banking system. Seven hundred and seventy four thousand merchants. Three seconds to settle.

That is the Al Etihad Payments scorecard for Aani as of April 2026, and every figure in it is impressive in the way that infrastructure figures usually are. The United Arab Emirates built a domestic instant payment scheme, connected it to almost every bank in the country, and put a merchant acceptance layer on top, in about four years.

Then there is the other number, the one the April 2026 release buries: 25,000. That is the daily count of transfers sent by phone number through the scheme.

Divide 25,000 by 12.5 million. You get 0.002. One transfer per five hundred registered users per day. Multiply by 365 and the scheme moves about 9.1 million phone number transfers in the year to April 2026, across a base that is larger than most of the country’s adult population measures.

The two sets of numbers are not in conflict. They are measuring different things, and the gap between them is the whole story. Aani has won the part of payments that is free to switch, and it has not yet won the part that costs a merchant three percent.

What Aani Actually Reported

The April 2026 release is the fullest disclosure the scheme has made, and it is worth setting out in full because most commentary quotes two numbers from it and skips the rest.

Table 1: Aani scheme metrics as reported in April 2026, with the February 2025 baseline where disclosed

Source: Al Etihad Payments , Aani release, April 2026; baseline from the February 2025 release.

The merchant number deserves a second look. Seven hundred and seventy four thousand accepting merchants in a country with roughly one million registered businesses is close to saturation of any merchant that has a bank account and a point of sale terminal. If that number is right, the acceptance problem is largely solved at the top of the market and the remaining question is throughput per merchant, not coverage.

The transfer number deserves the same treatment. Twenty five thousand a day is small for a scheme of this size. It is not small for a scheme that launched into a market where bank transfers, cash and card were all already functional. But it is not the number a payments executive would put on a slide if it were larger, and the fact that it is published at all is more than most schemes manage.

The Registered Base Is Not a User Base

Here is the arithmetic that the release invites and does not do.

Aani went from 1.5 million registered users in February 2025 to 12.5 million in April 2026. That is 8.3 times in the fourteen months to April 2026, which works out to roughly 16% a month compounded.

The April 2026 release states a monthly growth rate of 10%. Ten percent a month, sustained from February 2025, needs about 22 months to cover the same distance. The endpoints and the stated rate cannot both describe the same series.

There are innocent explanations. The registration count may have been restated, the February 2025 figure may have counted a narrower population, or the 10% may refer to a particular sub-period rather than the whole window. But the third explanation is the one that matters for anyone reading the headline: registered users is a stock that grows when a bank pushes a prompt to its app base, and it does not require anyone to transact. A bank with 400,000 customers can add 400,000 registered users in a quarter by putting Aani in the onboarding flow and counting the opt-in.

This is not an accusation of bad faith. It is a definitional point that applies to every instant payment scheme on earth, and it is why the useful denominator is not registrations but active accounts, which almost nobody publishes.

Use the harder denominator and the picture is still good, just smaller. Twenty five thousand transfers a day, against a base of 12.5 million, is a scheme in its adoption phase. Against 774,000 merchants it says nothing at all, because the 25,000 figure is person to person and the merchant rails are counted separately and, so far, not disclosed in volume.

What the 25,000 Actually Contains

Before leaning on that number any harder, it is worth being precise about what it counts, because the label is narrower than the assumption it invites.

The published figure is daily transfers sent by phone number. That is the person to person product where the payer types a mobile number instead of an IBAN, and it is the feature that makes an instant rail feel different from a bank transfer. It is not the whole scheme. It excludes payments initiated by QR code, request to pay, standing instructions, ecommerce checkout and any merchant flow routed through an acquirer.

So the 25,000 figure, as published in April 2026, is a floor on total usage and a ceiling on nothing. The scheme may be moving several times that volume through channels it does not headline, and a reader who treats 25,000 as the total is making an error in the opposite direction from the one the marketing invites.

The reason the number is still the most informative figure in the release is that it is the only throughput metric disclosed at all. Everything else in the April 2026 statement is a stock: users, institutions, merchants, coverage. A payments scheme can accumulate stocks for years without a flow, and the flow is what tells you whether the rails are load bearing. Of the seven metrics in that table, exactly one is a flow. That asymmetry is a disclosure choice, and it is a reasonable one for a scheme in its adoption phase, but it means the outside reader has one lever and should use it carefully.

The careful use is this: 25,000 a day is about 0.2% of the registered base transacting once daily. For comparison, a mature domestic scheme would expect an order of magnitude more. The gap is the adoption curve, not a verdict.

The Comparison That Does Not Transfer

Every instant payment story gets compared to Pix in Brazil and the unified payments interface in India, and both comparisons are made about the UAE. They should be made carefully, because the mechanism that made those two work is absent here.

Both of those schemes were pushed into merchant acceptance with a price advantage that was set by policy rather than by negotiation. In India, the merchant discount on the unified payments interface and on debit cards on the domestic network was set to zero by rule, which removed the acquirer’s incentive to defend the card spread. In Brazil, the scheme was launched as free for individuals and cheap for merchants, backed by a central bank that owned the rails and the rulebook.

The UAE built the rail and left the price to the market. There is no cap on card merchant discount rates, and there is therefore no administered gap for Aani to exploit. A merchant in Dubai comparing 2% on a credit card with whatever an acquirer quotes for Aani is making a commercial decision, not complying with a mandate.

That is not a design flaw. It is a choice with a cost that shows up later. In a mandated market, adoption is fast and the acquirer absorbs the loss. In a negotiated market, adoption is slower, the acquirer keeps its spread as long as it can, and the scheme’s growth depends on competition among the parties that own the spread.

Which means the UAE’s timeline should be read against a different benchmark. Pix and the Indian rail reached merchant scale in about two to three years because the price was set for them. Aani, launched into an uncapped market, should be expected to take longer at the till and to arrive first at the corridor, where the incumbent margin is a spread rather than a discount and the interoperability was built in from the start.

Variable One: Acceptance, Priced Without a Cap

The first structural variable is what a merchant pays to accept a payment, and the UAE is unusual because nobody sets a ceiling on it.

Card merchant discount rates in the Emirates in 2026 run 1.5% to 2.8% for credit and 0.8% to 1.5% for debit, according to the published market range, with no government mandated cap.

Table 2: UAE card acceptance cost by instrument, 2026, against the scheme economics an instant rail has to beat

Source: Gulf Business , UAE card MDR ranges, 2026 (site home).

Compare that with India, where the equivalent instant rail was pushed with a mandated zero charge on the unified payments interface and a capped debit interchange, or with the European Union, where interchange on consumer cards is capped by regulation. The UAE took neither route. There is no cap, no mandate, and no subsidy written into the scheme rules.

That choice has a specific consequence for how this plays out. In a capped market, an instant rail wins merchants because it is legally cheaper. In an uncapped market, an instant rail wins merchants only if the acquirer chooses to price it lower, and the acquirer is the party whose revenue comes from the card spread. The incentive to cannibalise is not automatic. It has to be bought.

The 774,000 merchant count reported in April 2026 says the acceptance layer got built. The missing number, merchant payment value, is the one that would say whether it got used. Until that is published, the honest statement is that the UAE has solved merchant onboarding and has not yet demonstrated merchant throughput.

Variable Two: The Corridor, Priced on the Spread

The second variable is the one with more money in it, and it is not domestic at all.

Personal outward remittances from the UAE were AED 183 billion in 2024, up from AED 169 billion in 2023, a gain of about 8.3%. That is roughly USD 50 billion leaving the country each year on 2024 flows, most of it through exchange houses and bank wires, and almost all of it priced on the FX spread rather than on a merchant discount.

The corridor that matters most is India. The UAE accounts for about 19% of India’s personal remittance inflows, which on a base of roughly USD 135.46 billion in the 2025 fiscal year puts the corridor at about USD 25.7 billion. The unified payments interface has been live in the UAE through the Aani linkage since 2024, which means the two largest instant rails in the region are now interoperable for exactly the flow that carries the most margin.

That is where the real contest sits. A domestic merchant payment in 2026 earns an acquirer 1% to 2%. A cross border remittance in 2026 earns an exchange house 1% to 3% in spread plus a fee, on a much larger ticket, with far less operational cost per dirham. Twenty five billion dollars of annual corridor flow at a 1.5% spread is roughly USD 385 million of annual revenue, and it is revenue that does not require a single new merchant to be signed.

Both variables are structural. Neither one is about consumer habit or marketing. And they are independent of each other: one is decided by acquirer pricing policy in a market with no cap, the other by FX spread compression on a corridor where the rails are now interoperable. That independence is why they can be tracked separately, and why a scheme can win one and lose the other.

Where the Two Variables Meet

Aani’s own design puts them in the same app, which is either the clever part or the problem.

The scheme is native to ISO 20022, the messaging standard that most of the world’s high value payment systems have been migrating to since 2021. That matters commercially rather than technically: ISO 20022 messages carry structured remittance data, which is what makes a cross border payment cheap to process and easy to comply with. A scheme built on it from the start can pass corridor data without translation layers, which is exactly the cost that exchange houses have been living on.

So the domestic merchant story and the cross border story are not two separate businesses sharing a brand. They are one capability, structured data moving instantly between two interoperable rails, being pointed at two different revenue pools. The one with the bigger pool is the corridor. The one with the bigger user count is domestic.

A payments scheme that follows its own incentives will spend the next two years on the corridor, because that is where the money is and where the interoperability already exists. That is also the part that most domestic merchants will never notice, which is why the 774,000 merchant number can keep growing while the 25,000 transfer number stays flat.

Who Gets Hit First

Four groups, ordered by how quickly the margin moves.

• Acquiring banks and payment processors, because a merchant payment that moves to an instant rail at a lower price takes the acquirer spread with it, and the UAE has no cap to protect it.
• Exchange houses and remittance operators on the India corridor, because their product is a spread on a flow that now has an interoperable instant alternative, and USD 25.7 billion of annual flow is enough to matter to any operator.
• Debit card issuers, because 0.8% to 1.5% is already a thin interchange and there is no regulated floor underneath it.
• Small merchants, who gain. A shop paying 2% on card acceptance has an obvious reason to prefer a rail that settles in three seconds for less, and the 774,000 acceptance figure says the plumbing is already there.

Credit card issuers are last on the list for a reason. A 2.8% top of range funds rewards programmes that customers value, and a payment method that does not fund rewards is not a like for like substitute at the top of the market. The credit card is not the target. The debit card and the exchange house are.

The Card Rail Is Being Rebuilt at the Same Time

The complication that most instant payment narratives ignore is that the UAE is upgrading its card rail in parallel, not retiring it.

Jaywan, the domestic card scheme, went live in 2026 on the UnionPay network with acceptance in 183 countries and access to more than 100 million point of sale terminals. That is a decision to give Emirati cardholders international reach on a Chinese network, and it is a decision that makes the card more useful, not less.

A country can run both. Instant payments for domestic low value flows, where the merchant discount is the cost that matters, and an international card network for travel, ecommerce and credit, where acceptance breadth and chargeback rights are the product. That is roughly the model most mature markets have landed on, and it is a better description of where the UAE is heading than the usual story about instant payments killing cards.

What it means for Aani is that the domestic merchant business will be contested on price by an incumbent that is simultaneously getting better at being a card. That is a harder fight than the one the scheme has been winning.

Two Indicators, and the Level at Which This Breaks

The read defended here is that Aani has won registration and person to person transfer, that its next two years will be decided on the India corridor rather than the domestic till, and that the merchant number will keep growing without telling anyone whether merchants are using it.

Two indicators would confirm or break that, and they need to move independently.

The first is merchant payment value, if it is ever published. The test is whether it grows faster than the merchant count for two consecutive quarters. If 774,000 merchants become 900,000 while value per merchant is flat, the scheme is onboarding, not penetrating, and this read holds.

The second is daily transfer count. Twenty five thousand a day is the level to beat. If it passes 100,000 without a corresponding rise in merchant payment value, then the scheme is becoming a person to person utility in the way that instant rails in Brazil and India did, and the merchant business is a side project. That outcome is not a failure, but it is a much smaller business than the corridor.

This read breaks in one specific way. If Aani’s merchant payment value is published and shows value per merchant rising while debit card merchant discount rates fall below 0.5%, then the domestic till is being taken and the corridor story is the smaller half. Watch the debit rate. It is the price that tells you whether acquirers have decided to cannibalise.

Data basis

Data as of October 2026. Aani metrics are from Al Etihad Payments releases, with the April 2026 statement as the primary source and the February 2025 figure used as the baseline; the 600% growth and 10% monthly growth are the scheme’s own stated figures and are reproduced, not re-estimated. Card merchant discount rates are the published market range for 2026, a range rather than a point estimate, and no government cap applies in the UAE. Remittance totals are Central Bank of the UAE data as reported for 2024 and 2023, in nominal dirhams. The India corridor figure multiplies India’s reported 2025 fiscal year personal remittance inflows of about USD 135.46 billion by the reported 19% UAE share, which is an estimate of the corridor rather than a bilateral statistic. Per user transfer frequency divides the daily phone number transfer count by registered users, which mixes a flow with a stock and is used only to establish order of magnitude. The corridor revenue estimate applies a 1.5% spread to the derived corridor value and is illustrative.

Limitations

Merchant payment value is not disclosed, so the domestic acceptance story cannot be tested, only bounded. The registered user series has an internal inconsistency between the endpoints and the stated monthly growth rate, and the explanation chosen here is a definitional one that cannot be confirmed from published material. The corridor estimate depends on a share that is reported annually and on a base year that may since have been revised.

Sources

• Al Etihad Payments , Aani reaches 12.5 million users, April 2026
• Gulf Business , UAE card merchant discount rates, 2026 (site home)
• Gulf Business , personal outward remittances AED 183 billion in 2024 (site home)
• Reserve Bank of India , personal remittance inflows and UAE share, 2025 (site home)
• Gulf News , Jaywan acceptance in 183 countries under UnionPay, 2026

This article was prepared by the expert team at Global Infinity Labs, drawing on insights and data provided through its MCP data services.

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