Mastercard and Arab Financial Services (AFS) have partnered to issue corporate credit and prepaid cards in the UAE and Egypt, integrating both products into the AFS Pro mobile application. The rollout begins in the UAE before extending to Egypt, with both markets positioned by the companies as priority growth targets for business payments digitalisation.
AFS, which is regulated by the Central Bank of Bahrain and licensed by the Central Bank of the UAE and Central Bank of Egypt, is majority-owned by 36 banks and financial institutions across the Middle East and Africa. The firm describes itself as the region’s leading digital payment solutions provider, a claim that sits alongside several well-capitalised regional competitors.
What the platform does
The integrated proposition combines card issuance with payment acceptance in a single application, which is the more structurally interesting element of the announcement. Finance teams can issue and manage corporate cards, set per-card spending controls, track transactions in real time and run expense reconciliation from within AFS Pro. On the acceptance side, the app includes SoftPOS functionality, allowing merchants to accept contactless payments on a smartphone, and a Pay-by-Link capability for remote or e-commerce transactions. A business dashboard provides sales performance data alongside the payments tooling.
The net result is a platform that addresses both payables and receivables within one application, reducing the need for separate card management, POS and reporting systems. AFS is also positioning the platform as a rapid-deployment option for banks and financial institutions that want to offer business payments products without building the underlying infrastructure themselves, a model that is increasingly common in the Gulf’s expanding banking-as-a-service market.
Dr Samer Soliman, group CEO of AFS, said the Mastercard partnership represents “a major win for businesses in the UAE and Egypt” by improving efficiency and oversight of corporate spending.
Market and regulatory context
The Middle East is a structurally attractive market for corporate payments infrastructure. Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Egypt have each published multi-year financial digitalisation strategies, and the region has seen sustained investment in B2B payment rails over the past three years. The UAE’s payments regulation sits under the Central Bank of the UAE’s Retail Payment Services and Card Schemes regulation, while Egypt’s Central Bank has accelerated licensing activity for digital payments firms under its financial inclusion framework.
The combining of card issuance and acquiring into a single platform is a model that several global fintechs have pursued in mature markets, but the Middle East and Africa remain relatively less consolidated, which gives a licensed regional incumbent like AFS a distribution advantage over international entrants that lack local regulatory approvals. Mastercard’s role here is primarily as network and brand layer, providing global acceptance and security credentials rather than the underlying operating infrastructure.
The competitive set in the UAE includes local and regional processors as well as the Gulf operations of global corporate card providers. The differentiator AFS is staking is not the card product itself but the unified payables-and-receivables platform, which, if it gains traction, reduces the commercial leverage any single card network or processor holds over the relationship with the business customer. How quickly AFS can sign financial institution clients to white-label the platform will be the clearest indicator of whether the B2B infrastructure angle has commercial legs beyond the two announced markets.
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