Ziina gets UAE central bank approvals for payments and transfers now

Ziina has secured UAE Central Bank approvals for retail payments and international transfers. The Dubai-based fintech received a Retail Payment Services Category III license and authorization to conduct Exchange Business Category IV activities under its existing Stored Value Facility license. The company says this makes it the first homegrown UAE fintech to hold regulatory authorizations spanning all three activities. The approvals were announced on 22 October 2026. The Stored Value Facility license, granted in 2024, allows Ziina to hold customer balances and operate a digital wallet. The new Retail Payment Services Category III license covers merchant acquiring, payment aggregation and domestic fund transfers. It authorizes products including payment links, QR payments, Tap to Pay and the online payment gateway. The Exchange Business Category IV authorization, granted in August 2026 under the existing SVF license, allows international money transfers and multi-currency foreign exchange through digital channels, including directly in the Ziina app. Faisal Toukan, co-founder and chief executive, said the licenses give the company the regulatory framework to build faster and expand the range of services on one platform, from spending and holding money to sending it abroad. The company has stated an ambition to take what it builds in the UAE to the wider Arab world. For a user or merchant the practical change is that Ziina can now offer holding, domestic acceptance and international transfer under its own licenses rather than through third-party arrangements. The company previously relied on its SVF license for the wallet. Merchant acceptance and cross-border transfer were more limited. Those two activities now have direct regulatory cover. The company reports that it serves more than 500,000 customers annually, processes more than $1.5 billion in annualized payment volume and is used by one in ten UAE SMEs. Those figures are self-reported. Earlier public numbers were lower. No independent audit of the volume or customer count is published with the licensing announcement. Ziina was founded in 2020 in Dubai by Faisal Toukan, Sarah Toukan and others. It raised a $22 million Series A in 2024 led by Altos Ventures. Total funding is reported above $30 million. The company previously described itself as the first venture-backed UAE startup to receive an SVF license. A further limit is the scope of the licenses. Category III and Category IV authorizations have specific activity boundaries set by the Central Bank. The announcement does not list every permitted corridor, currency pair, transaction limit or compliance requirement. Those details determine how widely the international transfer product can actually be used. Other UAE fintechs hold individual licenses. Ziina’s claim is that it is the first homegrown company to hold the combination of SVF, Retail Payments Category III and Exchange Category IV. The Central Bank has not published a public ranking of license holders to confirm or contradict that claim in the announcement. Saudi Arabia and other Gulf markets have their own payment and remittance licensing regimes. A UAE-licensed platform can serve UAE residents and merchants. Cross-border expansion into other markets still requires separate approvals. The Arab-world ambition is stated. The regulatory path outside the UAE is not detailed. The company has previously partnered with Lean Technologies on open finance payments in the UAE. That earlier work used the SVF license. The new licenses expand the set of activities that can be offered directly. They do not automatically expand the open-finance rails. Merchant products already in market include Tap to Pay on iPhone and Android and the Ziina Card. The new Category III license gives those products clearer regulatory cover for acquiring. The Category IV authorization adds the cross-border transfer layer that was previously outside the direct license perimeter. The combination of the three authorizations lets Ziina keep more of the payment and transfer flow inside its own regulated entity. It does not remove the need for correspondent banking relationships or compliance checks on individual transfers. Those operational requirements remain in place. If Ziina publishes the date international transfers go live in the app, the corridors available and the fees charged, the licensing milestone has a product follow-through. If the next update is only a further license announcement, the practical change for users remains the same as before. The figure missing is the live transfer volume.