Cross-border payments are being fixed locally, not globally. The UAE is proof.

As global efforts to modernise cross-border payments progress slowly, the UAE is demonstrating how strong domestic payment infrastructure can accelerate faster, more efficient international transactions

PUBLISHED: Thu 9 Jul 2026, 5:04 PM

By:
Kushmita Bose

The payments industry has been talking about fixing cross-border transactions for years. In 2020, the G20 endorsed a formal roadmap with clear targets: by 2027, three-quarters of cross-border retail payments should settle within an hour, costs should fall below one percent for retail and three percent for remittances, and pricing transparency should become the norm.

Five years in, the Financial Stability Board's own progress report tells a different story. As of late 2025, just over a third of retail cross-border payments settle within an hour. Nearly one in five remittance corridors still exceeds the three percent cost ceiling. The FSB itself acknowledged that satisfactory improvements at the global level are unlikely to be achieved within the original timeframe.

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The problem is not a lack of ambition. It is that cross-border reform depends on coordination between dozens of jurisdictions, hundreds of institutions, and overlapping regulatory regimes that move at very different speeds. Designing standards is one thing. Getting the world to implement them simultaneously is another.

A different approach: build domestic, then extend outward

While the global roadmap stalls, a different model is producing results. Rather than waiting for international alignment, several countries have invested in strengthening domestic payment infrastructure first — then connecting those systems bilaterally and regionally.

The UAE is among the clearest examples.

In under three years, the Central Bank of the UAE has assembled a domestic payment stack that did not previously exist. Aani, the country's instant payment platform operated by Al Etihad Payments, grew from 1.5 million users in early 2025 to more than 12.5 million by April 2026, covering a large share of the country's population. The platform now connects 74 licensed financial institutions, representing roughly 85 percent of banks in the UAE, alongside approximately 774,000 merchants. Transfers settle in under three seconds.

Alongside Aani, the UAE launched Jaywan, its first domestic card scheme, with co-badging agreements signed with Visa, Mastercard, UnionPay, and Discover in early 2025. The scheme gives the country domestic processing sovereignty while maintaining global interoperability through the international networks.

The Buna cross-border platform, owned by the Arab Monetary Fund and headquartered in Abu Dhabi, now connects more than 100 financial institutions across multiple Arab-region jurisdictions, settling in six currencies including AED, USD, and EUR. And in October 2024, the UAE and India agreed to interlink Aani with India's UPI — a move that, once operational, would create a direct instant-payment bridge between two of the world's most active remittance corridors.

Why this matters commercially

The UAE's investment in payment infrastructure is not happening in isolation from its broader economic trajectory. Non-oil foreign trade reached a record Dh3 trillion in 2024, growing at roughly six times the global trade average. In the first half of 2025 alone, non-oil trade exceeded Dh1.7 trillion, with year-on-year growth above 24 percent — at a time when the World Trade Organization was forecasting flat or slightly negative global merchandise trade for the year.

For businesses operating across these trade corridors — paying suppliers, collecting receivables, managing payroll, distributing marketplace earnings — payment infrastructure that works at speed and at scale is not optional. It is a competitive requirement. And the domestic-first model means that a transfer between a business in the UAE and a supplier in the same market now moves through the same instant rails as any domestic payment, rather than being routed through slower cross-border channels.

This logic extends beyond the UAE. India's UPI processed more than 228 billion transactions in 2025, making it the world's largest real-time payment system. Brazil's Pix exceeded 63 billion transactions in 2024, reaching over 170 million users. The United Kingdom's Faster Payments system handled nearly six billion transactions in 2024. Each of these systems was built domestically first, and each is now being connected to others through bilateral and regional linkages.

The infrastructure gap that payment providers are filling

For payment firms operating across multiple jurisdictions, this shift creates both a challenge and an opportunity. The challenge is that each domestic system has its own technical specifications, compliance requirements, and settlement characteristics. The opportunity is that businesses need providers who can connect these local systems into a coherent operational framework.

Breinrock is one example of a payments company building in this direction, with infrastructure supporting local-currency transactions across several financial hubs including the UAE. As more markets invest in domestic instant-payment rails and then seek to connect them across borders, the providers positioned to operate across multiple local systems are likely to play a growing role in the architecture of international payments.

Local first, global eventually

The cross-border payments problem will not be solved by a single global initiative or a universal standard imposed from above. It will be solved market by market, as countries build strong domestic rails and then connect them through regional and bilateral agreements.

The UAE's experience over the past three years suggests that this model can produce results faster than waiting for multilateral coordination. It also suggests that the future of cross-border payments is not a unified global system but a network of well-built local systems, linked through interoperability agreements that respect the sovereignty and regulatory frameworks of each market.

That is not a theoretical proposition. It is already happening.