Dubai Islamic Bank (DIB) has launched a Jaywan-branded debit card, making it one of the first major retail banking groups to bring the UAE’s national card payment scheme to a broad consumer base. The card is available to existing current and savings account holders and is live from 27 July 2026.
Jaywan is the UAE’s domestically developed card scheme, built and operated by Al Etihad Payments, a subsidiary of the Central Bank of the UAE. Its core purpose is to localise the processing of domestic card transactions, reducing the country’s reliance on international card networks for payments that originate and settle within its borders. By routing those transactions through local infrastructure, the scheme is designed to keep payment data inside the UAE’s jurisdiction and to insulate the national payments system from external network disruptions.
The strategic logic
DIB’s participation is commercially and politically significant. With group assets exceeding US$115 billion and more than 11 million customers across its global network, the bank provides Jaywan with an immediate distribution channel of material scale. For a national scheme still building acceptance and issuance, a rollout through the UAE’s largest Islamic bank materially accelerates the path to the cardholder base needed to make merchant acceptance commercially viable.
Group chief executive Dr. Adnan Chilwan described the launch as “a defining step in the UAE’s journey towards a more sovereign, resilient and future-ready payments ecosystem,” adding that DIB has a responsibility to support national initiatives that translate strategic ambition into wider adoption.
The concept of payment sovereignty has moved steadily up the policy agenda across the Gulf and beyond. The EU’s push for a digital euro and the broader debate around reducing dependence on Visa and Mastercard for domestic settlement share the same structural logic as Jaywan: keeping data and settlement flows inside a jurisdiction’s control reduces geopolitical and operational risk. India’s RuPay and Singapore’s NETS are established regional comparators; Jaywan is the UAE’s own answer to that model.
Regulatory and market context
Al Etihad Payments sits within the Central Bank of the UAE’s digital payments architecture, which also encompasses the Aani instant payments platform launched in 2023. Together, these initiatives form the backbone of the UAE’s Vision 2031 financial infrastructure agenda. Jaywan is specifically positioned as the domestic card rail within that wider ecosystem, complementing real-time account-to-account payments rather than replacing them.
For DIB, the launch is consistent with its designation as a Domestic Systemically Important Bank in the UAE, a status that carries expectations of active participation in national financial infrastructure projects. The bank does not disclose the number of Jaywan cards it expects to issue or a timeline for reaching full rollout across its account base.
The near-term indicators to watch are the pace at which other UAE retail banks follow DIB into Jaywan issuance, the growth of merchant acceptance points, and whether Al Etihad Payments publishes transaction volume data that would allow the scheme’s penetration to be assessed against international network volumes in the market.
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