CBUAE’s Financial Stability Report Names Aani’s 183% Growth a Resilience Factor

The Central Bank of the UAE issued its Financial Stability Report 2025 on 17 August 2026, and most of the coverage is leading with the topline banking numbers: AED5.3 trillion in sector assets, up 17.1% year-on-year, and AED90.8 billion in net profit, up 11.7%. The fintech-specific detail buried in the same report is arguably more interesting: CBUAE explicitly cites growth in its own Aani instant-payments platform and the Jaywan national card scheme as contributors to financial-system resilience, not just consumer convenience.

What the report actually says, beyond the headline numbers

Governor H.E. Khaled Mohamed Balama said

“The report affirms the strength and resilience of the UAE financial system and its ability to continue supporting the national economy efficiently. The CBUAE will continue to strengthen its supervisory and prudential frameworks to address future risks.”

The fintech angle: payment rails as a stability metric

Aani, the CBUAE’s instant-payments platform, saw transaction volumes grow 183% year-on-year, with more than 11.7 million customers now enrolled. The platform allows instant transfers up to AED 50,000, 24/7, with features including QR codes, payment requests and split payments. The report also references Jaywan, the UAE’s national card scheme, which completed its own real-world rollout this year: Jaywan debit and prepaid cards launched on 20 July 2026 with First Abu Dhabi Bank and Commercial Bank of Dubai as first issuers, followed a day later by Mastercard’s first Jaywan-co-badged credit card. Separately, the report notes the National Payment Switch now processes more than 2 million card transactions daily.

Framing payment-rail adoption inside a CBUAE financial stability report 2025, rather than a digital-banking or innovation report, is a deliberate signal: the CBUAE is treating Aani and Jaywan’s growth as part of the system’s structural resilience, alongside capital ratios and stress-test results, not as a separate innovation story running in parallel to the real banking numbers.

Why it matters

For how UAE fintech infrastructure gets measured

Most instant-payment platforms globally get evaluated on adoption and convenience metrics: users, volume, merchant coverage. The CBUAE folding Aani’s 183% growth into a systemic stability report suggests the regulator sees fast, resilient payment rails as a financial-stability lever in their own right, reducing settlement risk and cash-handling costs across the system, not just a UX upgrade. That’s a different bar than most national instant-payment schemes get held to.

For banks and fintechs building on CBUAE rails

The scale numbers- 11.7 million Aani users, 2 million-plus daily National Payment Switch transactions, plus Jaywan’s completed 2026 rollout- describe a payments infrastructure base that’s now large enough for banks and licensed fintechs to build consumer and merchant products on with real reach, not a pilot-stage network. The report itself doesn’t break down Aani or Jaywan adoption by bank or by transaction type, so which institutions are driving the growth remains unclear from this report alone.

What’s next

Whether the CBUAE begins publishing dedicated fintech-infrastructure metrics separately from its annual stability report, rather than folding them into it, is worth watching as Aani and Jaywan’s scale continues to grow.

FAQs

Editor’s Take: The genuinely new thing here is the kind of figure every UAE bank earnings story leads with every year. Putting Aani’s 183% growth and Jaywan’s rollout inside a stability report rather than a digital-transformation update is something new. That’s the CBUAE saying, in effect, that payment-rail modernisation is now part of how it measures whether the system can absorb shocks.