Huru to Issue Card on UAE's Jaywan Scheme Under Paymentology Deal
The Emirati salary app will put a card on the country's domestic scheme, run by Central Bank subsidiary Al Etihad Payments.
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
Huru is adding a card on Jaywan, the UAE's domestic card scheme, under an expanded partnership with Paymentology. The Emirati-owned salary and payments app said the card will sit alongside the services it already offers, and that it expects the scheme link to improve its card proposition while backing national efforts to strengthen domestic payments infrastructure.
Jaywan is operated by Al Etihad Payments, a subsidiary of the Central Bank of the UAE. The scheme routes, authorises and processes card transactions inside the country. Paymentology, which already supplies processing technology for Huru's card programme, will keep that role.
A payroll app built for volume
Huru launched in October 2025 and focuses on the UAE's unbanked and underbanked residents. More than 24,000 employers use it to pay staff, and about AED 3 billion in annualised salary flows pass through Huru accounts.
Jaywan integration helps Huru keep evolving its Universal Account and offer payment experiences more aligned with UAE financial infrastructure. — Abhimanyu Girotra, Chief Executive Officer of Huru
Nauman Hassan, Regional Director MENA at Paymentology, said the company aims to give Huru processing flexibility and scale so it can launch new capabilities quickly and with confidence.
The Universal Account push
Much of Huru's growth plan rests on its Universal Account, which carries an individual IBAN and belongs to the customer rather than the employer. The account stays with a user through job changes, so salary arrangements do not have to be set up again each time. Huru is working with nine exchange houses to widen adoption and aims to reach roughly one million accounts over the coming year.
What customers can already do
Inside the app, users can:
- receive their salaries;
- make domestic and international payments;
- send money overseas;
- top up mobile phones;
- put funds toward savings goals.
The app is available in seven languages.
Why the scheme matters
Domestic card schemes exist so that transactions between local cards and local merchants are routed, authorised and settled without leaving the country. For a salary app whose users include people outside the banking system, issuing on Jaywan puts everyday spending on the same rails the central bank supervises, rather than adding a foreign processing leg to a payroll product.
For Huru, the card is also a way to hold on to users after payday. A salary lands in the Universal Account, and the Jaywan card gives the holder a way to spend it without stepping outside the domestic system. Whether that turns into the roughly one million accounts the company is chasing over the next year is the open question the launch sets up.
