Qashio, the MENA region’s leading spend management solution, is rewarding its UAE customers with exclusive FIFA World Cup 2026™ fan experiences, including premium viewing access, interactive competitions, and hospitality benefits at Emirates Golf Club’s Footy Central in Dubai. The initiative gives customers the opportunity to experience a dedicated football watch party destination during the world’s biggest football tournament.

Running from 11 June to 19 July 2026, Footy Central will screen live matches alongside themed F&B, interactive games, family-friendly activities, competitions, and matchday entertainment. The programme builds on the global appeal of football’s premier event, which reached more than five billion viewers across all platforms during its previous edition, and reflects Qashio’s value proposition beyond spend management by turning client loyalty into tangible rewards and premium benefits.

The campaign will unlock exclusive access to selected matchday rewards and fan activations for Qashio customers, including F&B vouchers, matchday credits, Viya Points, gaming rewards, and VIP hospitality experiences. Viya Points, the digital reward currency within the Viya App ecosystem, can be redeemed across a premium lifestyle network of 400 venues, extending the value of the campaign beyond the matchday.

Guests can participate in the Ronaldo Header Challenge, where they can test their heading accuracy, while the FIFA Console Zone will host the PS5 FIFA Esports Challenge: Road to the Cup, with guests competing in head-to-head matches for leaderboard positions and daily rewards. Half-time engagement will include lucky draws during key matches, alongside Predict & Win competitions that reward guests for accurate match predictions.

Armin Moradi, CEO and Founder of Qashio, said: “Football is the most popular sport in the UAE among both Emiratis and the broader expat population, which makes the FIFA World Cup 2026™ a powerful moment to celebrate with our customers. Qashio was built to help businesses manage spend with more control and value, and this campaign extends that promise by turning loyalty into memorable experiences for finance leaders and teams across the country.”*

The FIFA World Cup 2026™ customer rewards campaign reflects Qashio’s broader approach to building a spend management platform that combines financial control with meaningful customer engagement. Through rewards, activations, competitions, and hospitality benefits, Qashio is continuing to create value for businesses beyond transactions, while giving customers new ways to engage with one of the most anticipated sporting events in the world.

For more information on the Footy Central experience and partnership opportunities, visit the link.

As geopolitical uncertainty, tighter liquidity and digital disruption converge, the CRO role is evolving from compliance gatekeeper to strategic business leader.

For much of the past decade, GCC banks operated in an environment defined by strong liquidity, rapid credit expansion and relatively stable macroeconomic conditions. Supported by high oil revenues and ambitious national growth agendas, the region’s banking sector became synonymous with resilience, scale and sustained growth.

That resilience has been tested in recent months and, so far, the sector has responded well. Recent banking data published by the Central Bank of the UAE (CBUAE) and the Saudi Central Bank (SAMA) suggests that customer deposits have continued to grow despite heightened regional uncertainty.

Customer deposits increased by 17% year-on-year as of April 2026, and 2% from February to April 2026 in the UAE, while in Saudi Arabia, the growth in deposits was 11% year-on-year as of April 2026 and 2% from February to April 2026 , reinforcing both markets’ positions as regional safe havens for capital. Growth in monetary aggregates and non-resident deposits further suggests that regional and international investors continue to view GCC banking systems as stable, well-capitalized and resilient.

Importantly, there is little evidence so far of the capital flight or systemic liquidity pressures that some observers initially feared. Instead, the data suggests that the UAE and Saudi Arabia continue to play an important role as regional safe havens for capital, supported by strong banking fundamentals, prudent regulation and proactive central bank intervention.

Central banks have also played an important role. Proactive interventions helped preserve liquidity, support credit expansion and provide targeted relief to sectors facing short-term disruption. In the UAE, banks were able to extend working capital facilities and restructure short-term obligations for fundamentally healthy businesses, helping bridge temporary cash-flow pressures while maintaining confidence across the financial system.

As a result, resilience is no longer simply a measure of capital strength. It has become a strategic capability that underpins the sector’s ability to navigate an increasingly complex operating environment.

However, what is clearer than ever before is that the operating environment around banks is changing rapidly—and as a result, so is the role of the CRO.

The recent regional conflict accelerated that realization. Traditional stress-testing models were largely designed around financial shocks such as market volatility, liquidity tightening, and credit deterioration. What many institutions are now confronting is a far broader challenge, where geopolitical tensions, cyber threats, operational resilience, and credit risk can all influence one another simultaneously.
Across the GCC, this has prompted some banks to reassess whether existing business continuity and resilience frameworks are sufficiently equipped for a far more interconnected risk landscape.

This is particularly relevant in a region where regulatory frameworks have prioritized sovereignty, local data residency, and operational control. Recent events have also created an opportunity for institutions to reassess how these strengths can be balanced with greater operational flexibility and diversification, e.g., for digital data storage.

At the same time, a second structural shift is unfolding more quietly beneath the surface.

According to analysis from FTI Consulting, GCC banks originated close to $1 trillion in new lending between 2020 and 2025 across Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar. Much of this growth took place during a prolonged low-interest rate environment and elevated liquidity conditions, meaning many portfolios, particularly across real estate and mortgage lending, have not yet been tested through a full economic stress cycle.

That could create a more complex operating backdrop for the years ahead.
For banks, the longer-term risk is not simply operational disruption. While business continuity and cybersecurity remain critical priorities, credit risk remains equally important. If short-term disruption were to evolve into a prolonged economic slowdown, pressure could emerge across borrower segments and asset classes, particularly in sectors that have benefited from strong credit expansion in recent years. In certain scenarios, a meaningful correction in real estate markets would have implications not only for borrowers but also for portfolio performance and risk provisioning across the banking sector.

This is precisely the type of forward-looking scenario that CROs must now anticipate, rather than simply respond to.

Modern CROs are increasingly expected to balance resilience, growth, operational continuity and profitability simultaneously, while helping institutions navigate a far more dynamic and interconnected operating environment. More importantly, the CRO can no longer afford to be purely backward-looking.

The institutions likely to outperform over the next decade will be those capable of identifying disruption early, adapting faster and embedding risk intelligence directly into strategic decision-making.

That requires a fundamentally different approach to risk management. One built around predictive intelligence, integrated scenario planning, dynamic stress testing and real-time decision-making.

Artificial intelligence and advanced analytics are becoming increasingly important in that transition.

Some leading regional banks are already investing in AI-enabled underwriting, early-warning systems and advanced collections capabilities that allow them to identify stress signals earlier and make more sophisticated portfolio decisions in real time. Others, however, continue to rely on fragmented legacy systems, manual workflows and reactive operating models.

That gap may become increasingly important during periods of disruption. Institutions that can identify emerging stress earlier, underwrite more effectively and anticipate portfolio deterioration before competitors will inevitably benefit from lower risk costs and stronger resilience outcomes.

Because in this new environment, resilience itself is becoming a competitive advantage.

The banks most likely to succeed will not necessarily be the largest or most conservative institutions. They will be the organizations capable of integrating risk more directly into strategic decision-making, modernizing operational infrastructure and responding dynamically to an increasingly volatile external environment.

The broader lesson for the sector is clear.

The GCC banking industry is entering a new era where resilience can no longer be measured purely through capital strength or regulatory compliance. Increasingly, resilience will be defined by adaptability and the ability to proactively anticipate interconnected geopolitical, operational, technological and economic disruption in real time.

A few years ago, most conversations around instant payments focused on speed. How fast can money move? Can transfers happen instantly? Can settlement operate around the clock? Those questions mattered because many markets were still building the underlying infrastructure required for real-time payments.

The UAE entered this space differently.

Digital payments were already widely used. Contactless behaviour was established. Consumers were comfortable using banking apps and wallets for daily transactions. The starting challenge was not introducing digital payments – it was making account-to-account payments practical enough to become part of everyday behaviour.

That distinction shapes many of the decisions behind Aani.

Aani was developed as part of the UAE’s Financial Infrastructure Transformation (FIT) Programme to enable instant account-to-account payments across banks, exchange houses, fintechs, and wallets through a common national infrastructure.

Today, more than 12.5 million users and 700 thousand merchants and SMEs are enrolled on Aani, through over 74 licensed financial institutions across the country.

Those numbers show reach, but reach alone does not create habitual usage.

People do not change payment behaviour because infrastructure exists. They change behaviour when the alternative becomes easier, faster, or more reliable within everyday situations. That is where account-to-account payments become more interesting.

One of the clearest examples is proxy-based transfers using mobile numbers. Users no longer need to exchange lengthy account details to send money. In April 2026, over 25,000 transfers were executed daily, just using mobile numbers. The behaviour itself is simple, but reducing friction at that level matters. Small reductions in effort often determine whether a payment method becomes occasional or routine.

The same applies on the merchant side.

For businesses, account-to-account payments create an additional way to accept digital payments, where money can be immediately transferred to the merchant’s bank account, simply using a QR code payment or sending a request to pay to the customer.  As merchant acceptance expands across the UAE, usage is gradually extending beyond person-to-person transfers into day-to-day commercial activity.

Most merchants and sole proprietors across the UAE are expected to accept Aani payments.

This shift is still developing, but it reflects a broader movement toward payment experiences that are immediate, simpler to initiate, and more closely connected to existing banking relationships.

Scale also depends heavily on ease of usage and reliability.

Consumers rarely adopt new payment behaviour because a standalone application exists. Usage grows when payment capabilities are integrated into tools people already use regularly. Aani services are available through mobile apps provided by their participating financial institutions, as well as through the Aani application itself, which means users can access instant payments within their existing banking apps rather than learning entirely new payment flows.

Achieving that familiarity required to reduce behavioural resistance is a key target that we keep in mind when developing any new product feature. Building a national payment capability is not only a technical exercise. It requires coordination across customer experience, operational readiness, dispute handling, fraud controls, onboarding journeys, and merchant acceptance. These are just some of the aspects that contribute to enhance the user experience and repeated usage of the payment scheme.

Another critical item is to ensure user experience consistency, across the various players in the ecosystem: while the infrastructure may be centralised, the customer experience is distributed across many institutions and channels.

That coordination becomes more important as payment use cases expand.

Current and upcoming functionalities will shape different expectations of the financial institutions and their end customers, being individuals or corporates, who are part of the ecosystem.

They will not just expect round the clock availability of services and speed, but also ease of usage, convenience, seamless experience, low cost of transactions and 

The harder measure of success is not whether transfers can happen in seconds. The infrastructure already allows that. The more difficult task is becoming efficient and seamless enough that the behaviour repeats without conscious effort. That is usually when payment systems become part of daily life rather than simply another available option.