Huru, the Emirati-owned financial app licensed by the Central Bank of the UAE as a stored-value facility and retail payment services provider, has formalised two partnerships that it says will extend its platform from salary management into card payments on the UAE’s domestic scheme and regulated digital-asset brokerage. Both agreements were signed at the Seamless Fintech Middle East 2026 conference in Dubai.
The platform reports AED 3 billion in annualised salaries flowing through its accounts from more than 24,000 employers, and says it is targeting the issuance of approximately one million Universal Accounts over the next 12 months in alignment with the Central Bank of the UAE’s (CBUAE) push for the Universal Account framework.
The two deals
The first partnership extends Huru’s existing relationship with Paymentology, a card-processing infrastructure provider active across emerging markets. The immediate commercial output is the planned launch of Huru’s card on Jaywan, the UAE’s domestic card scheme, scheduled for Q4 2026. Nauman Hassan, regional director MENA at Paymentology, described Jaywan as “an important step forward for the UAE’s payments ecosystem, creating greater choice for customers while strengthening the country’s domestic payments infrastructure.”
The second agreement brings in Bitpanda Enterprise, the business-to-business arm of the Vienna-headquartered digital-asset platform. Under the arrangement, Huru account holders will be able to buy, sell and hold digital assets from within the Huru app. The editor’s note attached to the release is worth emphasising: the crypto brokerage services are provided by Bitpanda Broker MENA FZCO, a Virtual Asset Service Provider licensed by Dubai’s Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority (VARA), and sit outside Huru’s own CBUAE licence perimeter. That structural separation matters for compliance purposes and limits the regulatory risk that sits directly on Huru’s balance sheet.
Market context and regulatory read-across
The Jaywan launch is commercially significant beyond its product value. Domestic card schemes have been a policy priority across Gulf Cooperation Council states as governments seek to reduce dependence on Visa and Mastercard rails and retain more of the interchange economics onshore. Huru’s position as a salary-receipt platform integrated with the Wage Protection System gives it a distribution route that many fintech challengers lack: employers, not consumers, drive initial account activation.
The digital-asset layer places Huru in a growing cohort of Gulf-based neobanks and e-money platforms that are embedding regulated crypto access as a feature rather than a standalone product. VARA’s licensing regime, introduced through Dubai Law No. 4 of 2022, provides the regulatory foundation for this kind of embedded access. The ADGM in Abu Dhabi operates a parallel framework. Both are broadly permissive relative to European equivalents, though firms must maintain clear structural separation between licensed banking activities and virtual-asset services, as Huru’s own disclosure illustrates.
The Universal Account model, which gives migrant workers a portable IBAN account that travels with them between employers, is directly responsive to CBUAE policy and addresses a documented financial-inclusion gap in the UAE’s large migrant-worker population. The nine exchange-house partnerships Huru references extend its remittance reach without requiring Huru itself to hold a full money-transfer licence in each corridor.
Chief executive Abhimanyu Girotra said the platform was built around a straightforward question: “What does someone actually need to do with their salary after it arrives?” That framing positions the Universal Account as an infrastructure layer rather than a product, which is the more durable commercial story here. Huru has not disclosed its current active-account base, revenue figures or unit economics, so the one-million-account target cannot yet be benchmarked against conversion or engagement data.
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