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Sat, Dec 06, 2025 | Jumada al-Thani 15, 1447 | Fajr 05:28 | DXB 
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How Dubai is aiming to go 100% cashless by next year
The first segment that the Department of Finance aims to target is blue-collar workers, who primarily rely on cash payments
By targeting blue-collar workers, tourists, and small businesses, Dubai will aim to assist all segments of society to go completely cashless by 2026.
On the first day of Dubai FinTech Summit, director of the digital payment systems regulatory division at Dubai government’s department of finance, Amna Mohd Binlootah, explained more about the plans to reach the Dubai Cashless Strategy.
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Dubai Crown Prince Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum first announced the strategy in October 2024, which aims for 90 per cent of all transactions to be cashless by 2026. This will potentially boost economic growth by over Dh8 billion annually through FinTech application and aligns with the Dubai Economic Agenda (D33) goals.
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Since the official announcement, Binlootah said there have been 35 successful partnerships between the government and private sector to better understand how to implement digital solutions.
Lack of trust, education and awareness
The first segment that DoF aims to target is blue-collar workers, who Binlootah said primarily rely on cash payments. “The main challenge in this area is actually lack of trust, lack of education, lack of awareness, and the high cost even for the blue workers because their salaries are very low,” she said. What was surprising in the department’s analysis, however, was that most lower-class workers owned one or two smartphones.
To combat this, Binlootah said that DoF will provide those blue-collar workers with a wallet “where they can transfer their money, salaries, [remittances], and transactions,” she said, adding that “they can use it also to get the virtual account and get small loans and loyalty programmes to make it attractive for them to use this wallet.”
The next segment the finance department plans to target is tourists, who play a big role in Dubai’s economic ecosystem, accounting for 12 per cent of the UAE’s GDP in 2024. Binlootah said, “based on our statistics and analysis that we have done with our consultants, we have around 30 to 35 billion of dirhams being used as cash basis from this tourism".
Working with private sectors and the UAE government, Dubai will give tourists in the emirate different digital payment solutions and enable international payments solutions like Alipay, RuPay, and WeChat Pay.
The final main segment that the department will focus on is small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). “Today, if you go to any small shop in Dubai, specifically in some of the places, they will tell you, ‘We would prefer to use cash'. The main problem is actually the high cost of acceptance on these terminals,” Binlootah said. Again, she attributed their use of cash due to a lack of trust and lack of education of digitised payments.
“The solution is to provide competitive packages for these merchants with the engagement of our strategic partners,” she said. “These competitive packages will have reduced cost of acceptance, as well as free soft Point Of Sale (POS) or QR code or tap-to-pay. That will encourage the merchants to be more digitised.”
In February 2025, a delegation from Dubai’s Department of Finance arrived in London, UK, to study the latest advancements in payment technologies, as part of the emirate’s cashless strategy.
FinTech (short for financial technology) are technologies that support banking or financial services. Popular examples include Tabby, Tamara, and ADIB. In the UAE, more specifically in the Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC), FinTech companies have raised over $4 billion in funding from local and global investors.
In his opening remark on the first day of the Dubai FinTech Summit, DIFC governor Essa Kazim, said the current market size of the fintech sector in the MENA region is “close to $1.7 billion and is expected to grow to $2.6 billion by 2030.”
Hind Aldah
Hind Aldah covers business, tech, crypto and all that jazz for a younger audience. In her spare time, you will find her playing classical guitar, painting amateur oil paintings, or crocheting the same old scarf that leads nowhere.
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