Ziina wins UAE central bank approvals for retail payments and exchange

Ziina has picked up two more approvals from the Central Bank of the UAE, one covering retail payment services and the other covering exchange business. The UAE-founded fintech now holds a Retail Payment Services Category III license alongside an Exchange Business Category IV authorization issued under its existing Stored Value Facility license.

Category III is the broader of the two. It covers merchant acquiring, payment aggregation and domestic fund transfers, and it gives Ziina full regulatory clearance for the merchant acceptance products it already sells: payment links, QR code payments, Tap to Pay on iPhone and Android, and an online payment gateway. The company describes the effect as a substantial widening of what it can do under supervision.

The exchange authorization, granted in August 2026, adds international money transfers through digital channels, including transfers sent directly from the Ziina app. The Stored Value Facility license the exchange permission hangs from was first issued in June 2024 and allowed the company to launch its digital wallet.

Ziina says it is the first fintech founded in the UAE to hold central bank authorizations across stored value, retail payment services and exchange business. The two new approvals complete the latest stage of its licensing with the regulator.

Faisal Toukan, the co-founder and chief executive, said Ziina is thankful for the central bank's continued support. He said the authorizations give the company a regulatory framework to build faster and push further.

Toukan traced the licensing push to the thesis Ziina launched with: that next-generation financial products could be built in the UAE and sold across the region. That conviction, he said, has only grown. He argues that people currently split their financial lives across a handful of apps and providers, and that Ziina's answer is consolidation — spending, holding and sending money abroad from one place. Keeping more of that activity in a single account, in his account of it, gives people more control over their money. The stated ambition runs past the UAE's borders: to take what is built domestically and use it to enable financial freedom across the Arab world.

The numbers behind that ambition are not small. Ziina counts more than 500,000 annual customers and more than $1.5 billion in annualized payment volume, and says one in 10 UAE small and medium-sized businesses uses the platform. The company was founded in 2020 by Faisal, Sarah and Talal Toukan.

Central bank data points to a market expanding quickly. The CBUAE's Annual Report 2025 recorded AED 9.9 trillion in retail transfers through the UAE Funds Transfer System last year, across 114.9 million transactions. Retail transfer value rose 19.9% year on year, and volume 17.8%. Ziina reads those figures as evidence of a large and increasingly active digital financial services market in the country.

The company is putting money into products, technology and infrastructure to pull more services onto the single platform, starting in the UAE and extending across the Arab world. The consumer app offers instant transfers, customizable payment links, QR payments, Tap to Pay on iPhone and Android, and the Ziina Card through Apple Pay and Google Pay. Ziina says the design has won awards, that it charges no initiation fees and carries no hidden charges, and that its interface is built to be easy to use.

Ziina Violet, the company's lifestyle membership, adds benefits from brands it describes as the UAE's most loved, along with zero currency fees on global spending with the Ziina card. The company positions itself as a financial partner to its annual base of more than 500,000 business and consumer users.

What the approvals change is less about features than about the terms on which Ziina competes. Merchant acceptance and cross-border transfer are segments where a license, rather than a product roadmap, decides who gets to operate. Holding all three permissions under one roof lets the company sell wallet, acceptance and remittance as a single product, and it lengthens the queue for rivals trying to match it. Ziina took its first license in June 2024. The distance between a wallet and full merchant and remittance permissions has now been closed in a little over two years.