UAE consumers are increasingly moving beyond traditional cash and card payments as buy now, pay later services, open finance, instant payments, cryptocurrencies and stablecoins reshape the country’s payments landscape.
The shift comes as Al-Futtaim expands its digital payments infrastructure through a strategic partnership with global payments technology company Juspay, which will serve as the group’s payment orchestration partner across its brands and markets.
Paul Carey, Executive Vice President of Cards, Payments and Fintech at Al-Futtaim, said payment choices have expanded significantly from a market that was once largely dominated by cash and cards.
Buy now, pay later services have become increasingly common, while open finance is creating opportunities for customers to make direct bank-to-bank payments.
Central banks are also supporting the modernisation of payment systems across the region. In the UAE, the introduction of Jaywan, the country’s domestic payment card scheme, forms part of wider efforts to develop local payment infrastructure.
Online spending continues to expand
Between 30% and 50% of spending across Al-Futtaim’s businesses now takes place online, depending on the individual business, according to Carey.
Digital assets are also beginning to enter the payments mix, with cryptocurrencies and stablecoins emerging alongside more established digital payment methods.
Juspay’s Nakul Kothari, Head of Asia-Pacific and the Middle East, said the rapid growth of cross-border commerce in the region is creating greater complexity for merchants as they manage multiple payment methods, markets and service providers.
Al-Futtaim’s partnership with Juspay is intended to address some of those challenges through a unified payments infrastructure.
The companies announced the partnership in September 2026, with Juspay providing payment orchestration technology across Al-Futtaim’s businesses. The platform is designed to support features including local payment methods, fraud management, tokenisation, analytics and reconciliation.
Stablecoins expected to gain larger role
Research from payments company Nium and financial technology research firm Celent suggests that alternative forms of money could take a significantly larger share of Middle East cross-border business payments over the next decade.
Banks surveyed expect stablecoins to account for an average 10.4% of outgoing cross-border business payment volumes by 2035, compared with 1.6% in 2025.
Tokenised deposits are expected to increase from 1.2% to 6.2% over the same period, while central bank digital currencies are projected to rise from 0.6% to 4.1%.
Combined, stablecoins, tokenised deposits and central bank digital currencies could represent 20.7% of payment volumes by 2035, compared with just 3.4% in 2025.
At the same time, banks surveyed expect Swift’s share of cross-border payment volumes to decline from 77.2% in 2025 to 55% by 2035.
Adoption challenges remain
The study surveyed 40 banks and 40 businesses across the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar.
Despite expectations for significant growth, adoption of new payment technologies remains at an early stage.
Around 53% of surveyed banks said they were struggling to establish a clear business case for adoption, while half said the technology was not yet mature enough.
The findings suggest the Middle East payments landscape could become significantly more diverse over the coming decade, with traditional banking infrastructure increasingly operating alongside stablecoins, tokenised deposits, central bank digital currencies and other emerging payment methods.
