Mastercard and AFS Bring Corporate Cards to UAE, Egypt

Mastercard and Arab Financial Services have introduced a corporate credit and prepaid card offering in the United Arab Emirates. The companies described it as a single platform for managing corporate spending and accepting payments. The product is scheduled to expand to Egypt after the initial phase.

The offering is built around the AFS Pro mobile app. AFS Pro acts as the control center for corporate spending. Through the app, companies can issue corporate cards to employees or departments. They can choose between credit and prepaid cards depending on how they want to fund purchases. Spending controls can be set to limit how much is spent and where. Every transaction appears in the app in real time, so finance teams do not have to wait for monthly statements.

The platform does more than manage money going out. It also handles money coming in. SoftPOS technology is included, allowing a smartphone to be used as a contactless payment terminal. That lets businesses accept card payments without buying separate hardware. A Pay-by-Link feature covers remote and e-commerce transactions. A merchant can generate a link and send it to a customer, who pays online. SoftPOS removes the need for a dedicated terminal, and Pay-by-Link removes the need for a hosted checkout page. Together, the two tools mean a business can sell in person and online without adding another payment provider.

AFS says the unified system aims to reduce fragmentation in financial processes. Many businesses use separate tools for expense management, payment acceptance, and reconciliation. This brings those functions together on one platform. Finance teams get transaction visibility across the board. Reporting tools support reconciliation and broader financial management. Instead of pulling statements from multiple portals and matching them by hand, a finance team can generate a single report that covers both spending and receipts. The company ends up with a single record of what was spent and what was received, which cuts down on manual work.

For banks, the appeal is in the delivery model. AFS Pro is a ready-to-deploy business payments solution. It is designed for financial institutions to offer to their business customers. Banks do not need to build the technology from scratch. They can plug the platform into their existing infrastructure and present it under their own brand. That reduces time to market and lowers development costs. It also gives banks a way to counter fintechs that have been chipping away at corporate payments. The platform handles the heavy lifting on the software side; the bank handles the customer relationship.

Dr. Samer Soliman, Group CEO of AFS, said the alliance boosts efficiency, visibility, and control over corporate spending for businesses in the UAE and Egypt. Mete Guney, Executive Vice President at Mastercard, said they will work with AFS to provide a scalable, digital-first corporate payments solution.

The phasing matters. Launching in the UAE first gives the partners a chance to test the platform in a market with high smartphone penetration and a dense business community. Egypt, the follow-on market, brings scale but also a different payments landscape. The strategic play is to give banks a low-friction way to serve corporate clients without building their own systems. The partnership pairs Mastercard's network with AFS's local presence. Whether it succeeds will depend on how well the app holds up in day-to-day use and whether businesses actually change the way they manage spending.