Ivo Bozukov on What's Growing Fastest

By Ivo Bozukov

Cards account for most payments made in the UAE. The Central Bank of the UAE's annual report for 2025 counts 560.7 million debit and prepaid card payments at the point of sale, nearly five times the 114.9 million retail transfers made between accounts.

Growth ran the other way. Debit card payments at the point of sale rose 4% over the year. Retail transfers rose around 18% in number, and the value they carried rose around 20%, to about AED 9.9 trillion (UAE dirhams).

Payments executive Ivo Bozukov treats the second set of figures as the one worth watching. "Counts tell you about habits, and the habit in the UAE is settled: people reach for a card," he says. "The transfer figures are where the change is, in both the number of payments and the value they carry."

Volume

Cards dominate the everyday count. Of the 560.7 million point-of-sale payments recorded in 2025, 522.6 million were on debit cards and 38.1 million on prepaid cards.

One reason may be structural. Opening an account with a UAE bank comes with a debit card, along with access to online and mobile banking, according to the government's official guidance on banking. For many people, the card is simply the first payment tool they are given.

"Cards have done their job extraordinarily well in the UAE," he suggests. "Over 560 million point-of-sale payments in a year is a mature, reliable flow. The interesting question is where growth will come from next."

Value

The answer sits in a different part of the system. Transfers are far fewer in number than card payments, yet they carry trillions of dirhams between accounts over the course of a year.

The same pattern holds at the top of the market. Institutional transfers numbered just 865,708 across the whole of 2025, yet between them they carried about AED 14.5 trillion, more than the retail transfers moved. Their value rose 33% over the year. The infrastructure behind them is well established. The government's banking guidance notes that use of the International Bank Account Number is mandatory for all electronic payments in the country, with the exception of credit card payments, giving every transfer a standard route from one account to another.

Velocity

Transfers are also the faster-growing flow, and their value grew faster than their number over 2025, which means the average transfer was larger than it had been the year before.

For a payment business, the composition of that growth shapes product decisions. Card acceptance rewards speed at the checkout and high transaction counts. Transfers make different demands: handling larger sums, giving customers confidence that money has arrived, and fitting into the way households and companies manage regular commitments.

Bozukov puts the difference down to what a transfer means to the customer. "A transfer is usually a bigger moment for the customer than a card payment," he says. "It might be rent, a salary or a payment to a supplier. When that flow grows by close to 18% in a single year, any provider that makes transfers faster, clearer and easier to track is serving the part of the market growing several times faster than card payments."

Cheques complete the picture. The central bank processed 23.78 million of them in 2025, 1.4% more than in 2024, carrying about AED 1.5 trillion between them, a figure up nearly 9% over the year. That is a substantial pool of value still moving on paper, and a further source of potential growth for electronic channels.

Direction

The digitisation of payments is a stated aim of the central bank. Its Financial Infrastructure Transformation Programme was set up to support the financial services sector and promote digital transactions, with full integration of its initiatives planned for 2026.

The range of providers behind these flows is wide. The government's official guidance lists stored value facilities, retail payment services, card schemes and a retail payment system among the categories the central bank licenses.

Whichever category a provider sits in, last year's numbers describe a market with two distinct centres of activity: card payments at the till, and transfers between accounts. The till is where the volume is. The transfers are where the growth is.

"Payment businesses count transactions, because that is the easiest number to report," Bozukov concludes. "What makes a checkout fast is not what makes a large transfer feel safe. In the UAE those are increasingly separate jobs, and the growth is in the second one."