The Central Bank of the UAE issued its Financial Stability Report 2025 on 17 August 2026, showing banking sector assets at AED5.3 trillion, up 17.1% year-on-year, and net profit of AED90.8 billion, up 11.7%. The non-performing loan ratio fell to 3.3%, down from 4.7% in 2024 and 8.2% in 2020, while the Capital Adequacy Ratio held at 17.0%.
Aani’s growth sits inside the stability assessment itself
Aani, the CBUAE’s instant-payments platform, , with more than 11.7 million customers now enrolled, offering instant transfers of up to AED50,000, 24/7. Jaywan, the UAE’s national card scheme, is also referenced; its 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. The National Payment Switch now processes more than 2 million card transactions daily.
the report “affirms the strength and resilience of the UAE financial system,” adding the CBUAE “will continue to strengthen its supervisory and prudential frameworks” to address future risks.
What distinguishes this report from a typical banking-sector update is where these payment figures sit: alongside capital ratios, non-performing loan trends and stress-test results, not filed separately as a digital-transformation initiative. That framing treats fast, widely-adopted payment rails as a contributor to systemic resilience, reducing settlement risk and reliance on cash handling, rather than purely a consumer-convenience upgrade.
Why it matters
For banks and licensed fintechs operating on CBUAE rails, the scale figures- 11.7 million Aani users, 2 million-plus daily National Payment Switch transactions, and Jaywan’s completed 2026 rollout- describe payment infrastructure large enough to build real consumer and merchant products on, not a pilot network. The report doesn’t break down adoption by bank or transaction type, so which institutions are driving Aani’s growth specifically remains unclear from this report alone.
For the region’s approach to fintech infrastructure oversight, the framing choice is notable in its own right: most instant-payment platforms globally are evaluated on adoption and convenience metrics separate from prudential regulation. Folding Aani’s growth into a stability assessment suggests the CBUAE treats fast payment rails as a structural resilience factor, a different bar than most national instant-payment schemes are held to.
The banking-sector figures underneath that framing are themselves stronger than the prior two years. The non-performing loan ratio’s decline to 3.3%, from 8.2% in 2020, tracks a multi-year deleveraging trend rather than a single-year improvement, and a Capital Adequacy Ratio of 17.0% sits well above the minimum regulatory requirement, giving the sector room to absorb the kind of shock the report’s own stress tests modelled: a Common Equity Tier 1 capital decline of 297 basis points under a severe adverse scenario, still comfortably above the regulatory floor.
What’s next
The report doesn’t disclose a target adoption ceiling for Aani, or a timeline for further Jaywan card categories beyond what’s already live. Whether the CBUAE begins publishing fintech-infrastructure metrics as a standalone disclosure, rather than folding them into the annual stability report, is worth tracking as both platforms continue to scale.
