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.