UK-based Checkout.com has added Jaywan, the UAE’s domestic card scheme, to its acquiring platform, allowing merchants to accept Jaywan cards through the company’s domestic connectivity. The integration, announced on 28 September 2026, is intended to help merchants comply with the UAE’s mandate on the scheme without changing their existing checkout set-up.
Jaywan and the UAE’s national payments infrastructure
Jaywan is operated by Al Etihad Payments (AEP), a subsidiary of the Central Bank of the UAE. The scheme forms part of the country’s digital transformation agenda and is designed to strengthen national payments infrastructure and support secure, sovereign digital commerce. Routing card transactions domestically allows merchants to reduce their reliance on international rails and keep more processing onshore.
A company official at AEP said that for Jaywan to become part of how businesses and consumers transact, acceptance needs to be built into the infrastructure they already use. The official added that the Checkout.com integration achieves this for digital commerce, and that the scheme will become more embedded in everyday commerce as other industry participants follow.
How the integration works
As banks and licensed financial institutions continue to issue Jaywan cards, Checkout.com will automatically recognise these transactions and route them over Jaywan payment rails. The routing is handled on the platform side, so merchants keep the same checkout experience for customers while operational and compliance complexity linked to the transition is reduced.
Checkout.com has also embedded AEP regulatory mandates directly into its acquiring platform, meaning new requirements from the scheme operator are applied through the same infrastructure merchants use for both local and global processing. A company official said the approach is meant to let businesses prepare for the mandate while managing performance, cost, and compliance within the platform they currently use.
Early merchant adoption
myAster, the omnichannel digital health platform of Aster DM Healthcare, is among the first platforms in the UAE to offer Jaywan as a payment method. myAster partnered with Checkout.com in December 2025 to build a global payment system for its digital healthcare services, which have more than five million registered users. Jaywan is available on both the myAster website and mobile application. A company official at Aster described the addition as a step towards making the digital healthcare journey more locally relevant for customers.
Checkout.com’s regulatory footprint in the UAE
The Jaywan integration adds to Checkout.com’s regulated presence in the country. In 2023, the company became the first global payments provider to obtain a UAE acquiring licence from the Central Bank of the UAE, according to Checkout.com. It has recently received in-principle approval for a Stored Value Facilities licence, which supports its plan to combine acquiring and issuing on a single UAE platform. Its merchants in the region include SHEIN, talabat, Tamara, and Careem.
Globally, Checkout.com supports more than 145 currencies and operates 19 offices. The company reported more than USD 300 billion in ecommerce payments volume in 2025.
For the UAE market, the integration illustrates how domestic scheme acceptance can be delivered through acquirers rather than through direct connections built by individual merchants, an approach AEP expects more industry participants to adopt.
