The Edenred UAE Central Bank of the UAE (CBUAE) approval covers a payroll and salary-card business that already processes monthly wages for more than 20,000 UAE employers and reaches over 2.5 million employees. Edenred UAE has received in-principle approval from the CBUAE for a Stored Value Facilities (SVF) licence, the company announced on 6 August 2026.
Edenred UAE has operated in the country for more than 18 years, providing payroll processing and salary-card services aimed largely at construction, retail, hospitality and logistics workers, sectors where a salary card is often the only financial account an employee holds. An in-principle approval evaluates a company’s governance, compliance, cybersecurity and operational controls; Edenred UAE still needs to complete further regulatory steps before the licence becomes final.
Claudio Di Zanni, managing director of Edenred Middle East, said: “Our clients trust us with something deeply personal: making sure their people get paid, safely and on time.”
Why salary cards carry regulatory weight in the UAE
Businesses like Edenred exist because of the , the UAE’s mandatory electronic salary payment platform, run by the Ministry of Human Resources and Emiratisation since Ministerial Decree 788 introduced it in 2009. Every private-sector mainland employer must pay staff through WPS within 10 days of the contractual due date, with MOHRE monitoring submissions in real time and fining non-compliant employers. For workers without a bank account, a WPS-linked salary card, the product Edenred issues, is how that mandatory payment actually reaches them.
An SVF licence is the specific CBUAE authorisation that lets a company hold customer funds and issue prepaid balances or cards against them, the legal basis for a salary card rather than a traditional bank account. CBUAE’s Stored Value Facilities framework requires licensees to hold a minimum of AED 15 million in paid-up capital, plus additional capital equal to at least 5% of the total customer funds they hold.
Bringing an existing WPS salary-card operation under that licence is a different exercise to a new fintech securing its first one. Edenred’s compliance and capital obligations now sit inside a regime built for products already handling other people’s wages at scale.
Chloé Perrin-Macgaw, director of marketing at Edenred UAE, wrote on LinkedIn following the announcement that securing in-principle approval is “definitely not a box-ticking exercise,” adding: “The CBUAE’s requirements are extensive, and that level of scrutiny is exactly what should be expected of anyone handling people’s money.” She put the company’s scale in context: “We serve 2.5 million cardholders in a country of about 11 million people. That’s a scale of trust that comes with real responsibility, and it’s on us to keep matching it.”
An established business, not a new launch
Edenred UAE is the regional arm of a much larger group. Edenred traces to 1962, when Jacques Borel created Ticket Restaurant, a French meal voucher recognised as an employee benefit under a 1967 government decree. The group in July 2010. It now operates in 46 countries, serves roughly 50 million employee users worldwide, and reported group revenue of about $3.34 billion over the twelve months to December 2025.
That scale sets this approval apart from the newer UAE fintechs that have gone through the same CBUAE process this year. Checkout.com received in-principle SVF approval in July 2026, adding card issuing to its existing acquiring licence. Pemo and KamelPay both secured SVF-related approvals covering corporate spend and payroll products they built from scratch.
Yalla Financial Solutions received a related but distinct in the same period. Edenred’s approval instead formalises an operation that has run for 18 years, under a regulatory framework introduced more recently than the business itself.
Edenred UAE has not given a timeline for when the in-principle approval converts to a final SVF licence, and hasn’t said whether the licence changes the salary-card product itself once it is operational. For the 2.5 million employees already using Edenred’s cards, the near-term change is regulatory status rather than a new feature.
