Abhi and NymCard Team Up to Speed SME Lending in the UAE
The two firms will pair earned wage access and business finance tools with card and payments infrastructure to shorten the SME credit journey for UAE lenders.
Nadia Mansour Nadia Mansour covers fintech across the UAE and MENA for Anecdoted -- digital banking, payments licences and the startups building around them. nadia@anecdoted.com
Abhi and NymCard have struck a partnership aimed at UAE financial institutions that want to extend credit to small and medium-sized enterprises with less friction. The arrangement brings Abhi's business financial solutions together with NymCard's card and payments infrastructure.
Abhi runs an embedded finance platform that includes earned wage access alongside other financial technology products. NymCard supplies payments infrastructure across the Middle East. Under the partnership, the two companies will combine those capabilities for lenders serving the SME segment.
The tie-up is designed to cover the main stages of the SME credit journey. That runs from digital onboarding and origination through to decisioning and disbursement. Banks and licensed financial institutions can use the combined stack to consolidate steps that have historically been split across separate systems.
Lenders that adopt it can onboard SME customers, process their applications and reach credit decisions more quickly before releasing approved funds. They can also roll out and scale SME credit products without assembling and connecting multiple components on their own.
For SMEs themselves, the two companies say the result is a shorter and simpler route from submitting an application to receiving approved funds.
There is a significant opportunity for technology to transform how SME credit is delivered in the UAE.
That was the assessment of Shiraz Ali, Chief Business Officer at NymCard.
Zain Ali, AVP, Sales & Partnerships at Abhi, framed the partnership as a way to streamline the process. By combining Abhi's technology with NymCard's platform, he said, the two firms can simplify the credit journey and serve SMEs more efficiently.
Both companies describe the agreement as a reflection of a shared focus on technology that helps UAE financial institutions bring digital financial products to market more efficiently.
What the partnership covers
- Digital onboarding and origination for SME borrowers
- Credit decisioning
- Disbursement of approved funds
- Card and payments infrastructure from NymCard
- Business financial solutions and earned wage access from Abhi
Who it is aimed at
The target users are banks and licensed financial institutions in the UAE that lend to SMEs, along with the SMEs applying for that credit. Abhi and NymCard position the combined offering as an alternative to lenders building each piece of the credit process in-house and wiring those pieces together.
The two firms say the partnership is intended to let lenders introduce SME credit products and scale them up without that integration work.
