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Aani, the UAE's national instant payments platform, now moves about 25,000 transfers a day using nothing but a mobile number, and has signed up 12.5 million users since launch, according to Al Etihad Payments (April 2026). That's not a pilot. That's national payments infrastructure running at production scale.
Real-time payments in the Middle East and Africa (MEA) have moved past the adoption question. The market is forecast to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 13.7% through 2030, according to Mordor Intelligence, and the broader Middle East and North Africa (MENA) digital payments market is on track to nearly double, from USD 275.47 billion in 2026 to USD 462.41 billion by 2031 — a CAGR of 10.92%, per a March 2026 ResearchAndMarkets report. The trajectory mirrors what APAC went through several years earlier — except MEA is scaling faster, on infrastructure built to be instant and irrevocable from day one.
Three forces are driving that scale-up:
- Request-to-pay services, which let banks and fintechs build new revenue streams around payment requests rather than just processing them.
- Central bank mandates, which require licensed financial institutions to connect to national instant payment rails rather than leaving adoption to the market.
- Cloud infrastructure, which gives banks and processors the elastic capacity to handle transaction volumes that batch-era systems were never built for.
Increased customer convenience
Customers expect payments to move at the speed of the request, not the speed of the bank.
Smartphone penetration across the region has made real-time payments the default expectation, not a premium feature. Request-to-pay services in particular let businesses optimize cash flow, cut payment delays, and reconcile against what's actually in the account — rather than what a batch file said was in the account 12 hours ago.
Aani: the UAE's instant payments platform, at scale
What was framed as a launch two years ago is now core national infrastructure.
The UAE's central bank, through its subsidiary Al Etihad Payments, mandated that all licensed banks connect to Aani. That mandate now shows up in the numbers: Aani is integrated with 85% of UAE banks, connects 74 licensed financial institutions, and has been adopted by roughly 774,000 merchants as a primary payment method, according to Al Etihad Payments (April 2026). Transfer volumes rose sixfold year-on-year, with average transactions settling in around 3 seconds.
[IMAGE: Person completing an instant mobile payment transfer in the UAE, phone screen showing a transfer confirmation]
That's the difference between "digital transformation" and a real-time payments claim. A bank can digitize a form. It can't digitize the requirement that a transfer settle in 3 seconds, at national scale, consistently.
Saudi Arabia: a second proof point, not a footnote
The UAE isn't the only Gulf market treating instant payments as mandatory infrastructure.
Saudi Arabia's national instant payment system, sarie, operated by the Saudi Central Bank (SAMA), settles transfers of up to SAR 20,000 24 hours a day, across every licensed bank in the Kingdom, using a mobile number, national ID, or email address in place of an International Bank Account Number (IBAN). Across the wider Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), the same pattern is repeating: instant payments as a required rail for banks, not an optional add-on.
Cloud-based payment systems
Cloud made the mandate operationally realistic.
None of this — national mandates, sub-second settlement, 24/7 availability — is achievable on the batch infrastructure most banks built their core systems on. Cloud-based payment processing gives banks and financial institutions the elastic capacity to scale instant payment volumes without re-platforming every time a mandate expands, while improving resilience and cutting the cost of running parallel batch and real-time systems.
"Real-time payments don't fail quietly at month-end close. They either settle in seconds, or the failure is visible immediately."
What scale like this actually tests
The bottleneck has moved from adoption to reliability.
Batch reconciliation remains useful for closing the books and catching discrepancies over time — but it wasn't built to catch a problem while a payment is still in flight, and instant payments don't leave that kind of grace period. A transfer that used to move through overnight reconciliation now has to be correct the first time, in real time, with no next-day window to quietly catch an error.
For banks and payment providers connecting to Aani, sarie, or any other national instant payment rail, visibility can't be a monthly report. It has to be continuous and transaction-level — fast enough to act on before a failed transfer becomes a customer complaint, or a regulatory one.
How IR Transact can help
Visibility that moves at the same speed as the payment.
IR Transact's real-time payments solution gives banks and payment providers visibility across their instant payments environment as transactions move, not after they settle. That means teams can identify a rising failure rate, a slowing rail, or a message quality issue as it happens, instead of reconstructing what went wrong from a next-day report.
For institutions connecting to Aani, sarie, or any other MEA real-time rail, that's the difference between meeting a central bank's uptime expectations and finding out about a problem when a customer does.
Where this goes next
MEA's real-time payments market isn't asking "will this get adopted" anymore — Aani's numbers and sarie's mandate already answered that. The open question now is whether the institutions running on these rails can prove, transaction by transaction, that the rails are actually working. That's an observability problem, not an adoption problem.
Get a demo of IR Transact to see what real-time visibility into your payments environment looks like in practice.
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