tabby, a Middle East “Buy Now Pay Later” platform, announced that it has partnered with Swedish home furnishing retailer, IKEA to provide customers in the UAE with the flexibility to pay in interest-free installments for their online and in-store purchases. tabby enables customers to purchase products online or in IKEA stores and pay after 14 days or in installments over three months. The flexible payment solution is available in-store in Dubai at IKEA Festival Plaza and Festival City, in Abu Dhabi at IKEA Yas Island, Al Ain Bawadi and Al Wahda and will roll out online by the end of…

Saudi Aramco Development Company, a subsidiary of Aramco, announced it had teamed up with Google Cloud to offer high-performance, low-latency cloud services to enterprise customers in Saudi Arabia. The Kingdom is being added to the global network of Google Cloud Platform regions, as part of a strategic alliance agreement signed between Saudi Aramco and Google Cloud. Google Cloud will establish and operate a new cloud region in Saudi Arabia, while a new company will be formed following all required regulatory clearances to supply cloud solutions and services to enterprise customers, with an emphasis on businesses inside Saudi Arabia. This new…

Abu Dhabi’s Technology Innovation Institute (TII), the applied research pillar of the Advanced Technology Research Council (ATRC), announced that its Cryptography Research Centre (CRC) has built the UAE’s first national and sovereign crypto library. By leveraging a combination of custom symmetric and asymmetric cryptographic primitives, the national crypto library is designed, developed and tested to safeguard confidential and high-security information. Researchers at CRC, one of TII’s initial seven dedicated research centers, have already released multiple versions of the crypto library and are working on its seamless integration into the UAE’s critical digital infrastructure. CRC currently employs and collaborates with scientists…

The UAE e-commerce sector is expected to continue on an upward trajectory due to the digital payments boom during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a joint study by Dubai Economy and Visa. The “United Arab Emirates (UAE) eCommerce Landscape 2020” report reflects market activity over the last 12 months and, in particular, the impact of the COVID-19 outbreak, highlighting key trends and insights drawn from Visa’s transaction data on how and where consumers have been spending. The report also highlights new challenges and opportunities that the crisis has created. The shift to shopping online is expected to hold long-term as…

First Abu Dhabi Bank (FAB) has partnered with Visa to launch digital payment solutions, the Visa Central Travel Account and Virtual Corporate Cards, to cater to its corporate clients. The Central Travel Account solution was designed to make it easier for companies to centrally manage travel payments by consolidating and matching key travel data with transactional financial data. This will help corporates in tracking and managing their travel spends and enable them to produce detailed reports highlighting savings. FAB also unveiled the Visa Virtual Corporate Cards, supported via Visa’s Payables Automation (VPA) solution, to address payment challenges in business-to-business (B2B)…

Airome Technologies, a Singapore-based developer of cybersecurity solutions for digital banking and e-document management systems, has been working with authentication and transaction confirmation technologies for a while, creating advanced products in this field. However, with the pandemic situation the company has faced a new challenge as to how to personalise a user’s device to enable them to authenticate in this new normal. As Airome Technologies works with critical data, they need to use more than just passwords to authenticate a user. It is essential to provide strong cryptographic authentication with key distribution schemes. For an example, a standard case for…

Cloud banking platform Mambu announced that they have set up a new office in Abu Dhabi as the United Arab Emirates has quickly emerged as a key market for it. As a state-of-the-art hub, the UAE is consistently evolving and developing the junction of financial services and technology. The fintech solutions that the country supports include mobile banking and crypto currency. With the highest number of mobile penetrations globally at 173 percent, the region offers an extensive customer base for digital banking. “Our philosophy of building digital attackers and neobanks future-proof architecture, while enabling them to adopt the latest cloud-based…

Amazon has launched its Amazon Payment Services, previously known as PAYFORT, as a payment processing service in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region aiming to empower businesses with simple, affordable, and trusted online payment experiences. The newly launched Amazon Payment Services provides secure online payment services that are easy-to-use, leveraging Amazon scalable and reliable technologies. Established in 2013 as one of the first fintech companies in the region, PAYFORT has gained a deep understanding of businesses’ needs across the region. In 2017, Amazon acquired PAYFORT as part of the Souq Group acquisition. Since then, the focus has been…

Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC), announced that Ebury, a UK fintech startup offering cross-border financial services and risk management, has been granted a Financial Services license to carry out the regulated activity of providing Money Services from the center. Ebury, which has 22 people based out of the UAE already, has become the first company to be granted such a license to engage in money services under the Dubai Financial Services Authority’s (DFSA) comprehensive Money Services Regime. The license will allow Ebury to enhance the services it offers SMEs in the region, and to do it in or from the…

Open banking is making inroads in the Arab world but visions and strategies between countries across the region vary dramatically. Defining a holistic vision for open banking in the region will allow Arab countries to fully reap the fruits of fintech innovation, according to a new report by the MENA Fintech Association. In a report titled Open Banking: Vision from the Arab World, experts representing regional open banking pioneers DAPI, Tarabut Gateway and Lean, as well as Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM), Dubai International Finance Centre (DIFC), the Arab Monetary Fund, MasterCard and OneConnect, calls for the region’s banks, fintechs…

Digital banking is heating up in the Middle East with now more than 20 neobanks across the region, according to new data from Dutch fintech consultancy group Fincog. Most of these neobanks were launched by incumbents as standalone digital banks and provide a full range of financial products that aim to act as full replacements for traditional banking offerings. Examples include ila Bank by ABC Bank and meem by Gulf International Bank, both in Bahrain, as well as Pepper by Leumi bank in Israel. In the United Arab Emirates (UAE), there are Liv and E20 by Emirates NBD, Mashreq Neo…

Emirates NBD announced that its mobile banking app is now available on the Huawei AppGallery, providing its customers with added choice and flexibility. The partnership places Emirates NBD’s mobile banking app on what Huawei claims to be the world’s third-largest app store that has over 500 million monthly active users. Emirates NBD’s mobile banking offers safe and secure on-the-go banking convenience allowing users to carry out their daily banking transactions or apply for new products easily. New customers can open accounts instantly by simply scanning in their identification documents. Existing users can carry out a variety of transactions such as…

The Central Bank of the UAE (CBUAE) announced the opening of its fintech office during the FinTech Abu Dhabi 2020, that the former co-hosted with the Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM). The new office aims to develop a mature fintech ecosystem within the UAE and position the nation as a fintech hub regionally and globally. On this occasion, H.E. Abdulhamid M. Saeed Alahmadi, Governor of the Central Bank of the UAE, said: “The UAE is no longer on the fringes of the global fintech revolution but moving toward the center of it. At the CBUAE, we have played a proactive…

Fintech revenues in Nigeria are projected to reach an estimated US$543 million by 2022, driven by increasing smartphone penetration and a large population of unbanked eager to adopt digital financial services, according to a new report by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU). The report, titled State of Play: Fintech in Nigeria, examines key trends in the Nigerian fintech sector, and assesses industry drivers. According to the study, Nigeria is home to a burgeoning fintech startup community and is rapidly emerging as one of Africa’s fintech leaders. McKinsey estimates that there are currently over 200 fintech standalone companies in the country,…

FinaMaze, based in Abu Dhabi, announced the launch of its AI-powered robo asset manager for the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region during the Fintech Abu Dhabi 2020 forum. FinaMaze offers tailor-made solutions to navigate the financial investment maze through smart portfolios designed according to each investor’s decision-making and attitude in both simulated and real financial situations. The AI aims to reveal the natural financial behavior, the risk appetite and the goals of each investor, out of thousands of possible multi-dimensional profiles. The robo asset manager is said to further boost investment performance by detecting financial market trends and…

The Saudi Central Bank (SAMA) and the Central Bank of the United Arab Emirates (CBUAE) have released the report on their joint central bank digital currency (CBDC) initiative dubbed as Project Aber. The wholesale CBDC used only by the central banks and the banks participating in the initiative, as a settlement unit for domestic as well as cross-border commercial bank transactions between Saudi Arabia and the UAE. This initiative aims to proof of concept for, study, understand, and evaluate the feasibility of issuing a digital currency for central banks (wholesale CBDC) with a view to developing cross-border payment systems and…

Venture capital firm SEED Group has partnered with German blockchain and cybersecurity specialist Ubirch. As part of this agreement, SEED Group will facilitate Ubirch to expand its business portfolio in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and the wider Middle East region by offering it an effective platform to reach potential customers and market its products and services in an efficient manner. Based in Dubai, SEED Group is owned and chaired by the Private Office of Sheikh Saeed Bin Ahmed Al Maktoum, a billionaire member of Dubai’s ruling Al Maktoum family. The group is a diversified entity seeking to establish strategic partnerships…

Globally, initiatives across different jurisdictions have emerged to make open banking a reality, ranging from direct regulatory requirements, like what’s been done in the UK and the European Union (EU), to market-coordination and industry-led initiatives such as in the US and Switzerland. In the Middle East, open banking remains in its infancy with just a handful of startups and so far only one jurisdiction having taken significant steps towards the change. In the region, Bahrain has been a pioneer in the domain, and was the first country in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) to introduce regulations requiring all…

Card company UnionPay International partners Abu Dhabi Islamic Bank (ADIB) to enable UnionPay card and contactless payment transactions on the bank’s 15,000 near field communications (NFC) terminals in the UAE. As a safer payment method during the COVID-19 pandemic, UnionPay International has been pushing for contactless and online payments solutions as part of its efforts to protect consumers at the checkout. All of the bank’s point of sale (POS) terminals have been enabled to provide a contactless payment service. The bank’s 15,000 NFC terminals are spread across many industries and service types including hospitals, hotels, government, supermarkets and everything in between.…

FSS (Financial Software and Systems), a global payments technology company, announced that it would be expanding its footprint to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA). KSA is among the advanced digital payment economies in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), with growth propelled by a combination of strategic investments in building digital infrastructure and enabling regulatory policy framework. A proactive proponent of electronic payments, KSA has set an ambitious target to achieve 70% non-cash transactions by 2030, opening promising revenue opportunities for established banks as well as fintech players. The growth is also poised to bring in disruption from new market…