Article Detail | Fintech Oasis

Al Etihad Payments' real-time rail is extending instant transfers across the UAE's banking system.

The national rail

Aani, the instant payment platform operated by Al Etihad Payments and overseen by the Central Bank of the UAE, is the UAE's answer to a question the rest of the Gulf has also been asking: how to move money between banks in real time, using identifiers people actually remember.

The platform supports transfers by mobile number, and has been extended toward QR-based payments and cross-border corridors. As more banks connect, the system's usefulness rises for every customer on it — the defining property of a payment network.

From launch to ubiquity

The early phase of any payment system is a chicken-and-egg problem: banks connect slowly because there are few reachable counterparties, and customers use it little because few banks support it. Aani's rollout has been managed to break that cycle — by onboarding the major banks first, ensuring that the day-one reachable universe was large enough to matter.

That strategy appears to be working. Transaction volumes have climbed as connection has become near-universal among the country's retail banks, and the platform has become a reference point in the CBUAE's broader financial infrastructure programme.

What it changes

The practical effect of Aani is to give the UAE a domestic, real-time, account-to-account payment channel that competes with cards on speed and beats them on cost for merchants. That shifts economics toward bank-to-bank payments and creates the substrate for services — from request-to-pay to instant lending — that depend on real-time money movement.

The regional pattern is now consistent: each Gulf economy is building its own instant payment rail, and the next frontier is connecting them. Aani's domestic maturity is the precondition for that cross-border step.