UAE payments company Foloosi has received in-principle approval from the Central Bank of the UAE for a Category III licence under the country’s Retail Payment Services and Card Schemes Regulation. The decision moves the company through a stage of the licensing process, while final approval remains subject to meeting the central bank’s remaining requirements.
The announcement concerns a business that helps merchants collect payments online and in person. Foloosi says it has handled more than $1.91 billion (AED 7 billion) in payments and served over 10,000 merchants across the UAE.
A merchant might encounter Foloosi through a payment link sent with an invoice, a checkout page on an online store or a phone used to accept a contactless payment. Its range of tools gives context to the licensing news: the company has grown beyond the online payment gateway from which it began, while seeking a defined place within the UAE’s regulated payments system.
Approval Comes With Further Conditions
Foloosi described the decision as in-principle approval, rather than the grant of a final licence. The company says it must still fulfill conditions prescribed by the CBUAE.
An in-principle decision indicates progress in an application, but it should not be described as permission already granted to undertake every activity covered by a final Category III licence.
The CBUAE’s Retail Payment Services and Card Schemes Regulation sets out categories for payment-service licences and the activities associated with them. The category is a regulatory classification; it does not, on its own, establish which additional services a particular applicant will launch or when they will become available.
Co-founder and CEO Omar Bin Brek said: “Receiving In-Principle Approval from the Central Bank of the UAE is an important milestone for Foloosi and reflects the progress we have made in building a strong, secure and scalable payments business in the UAE. We started Foloosi with a simple ambition: to build payment technology in the UAE that could serve businesses of every size. Today, after processing more than AED 7 billion in payments and serving over 10,000 merchants, we are entering the next chapter of that journey. Our focus now is to complete the remaining regulatory requirements and continue building Foloosi into a trusted payments infrastructure company for the UAE.”
A Broader Set of Merchant Tools
Founded by Bin Brek and Mohan K, Foloosi started with online payment acceptance and has since added payment links, invoicing, subscriptions, QR payments, Tap to Phone and point-of-sale offerings. The products address different points at which a business asks a customer to pay, whether at a counter or after receiving a bill.
That breadth may matter to a small merchant managing several sales channels. An invoice sent after a job, a recurring charge and a purchase made in a store create different payment and record-keeping tasks. Foloosi presents its platform as a way to handle those tasks together, although the announcement supplies no comparative data on merchants’ costs, payment success rates or time saved.
The move from online checkout into in-person payments reflects how merchants sell across multiple settings. A business can take orders through a website, share a payment link with a customer and accept a contactless payment at its premises, drawing on different tools within Foloosi’s offering.
AI Plans Remain a Future Direction
Alongside the licensing announcement, Foloosi outlined plans to use transaction and operational data to support functions such as fraud analysis, payment routing and reconciliation. It has framed these as part of a longer-term approach to payments infrastructure, rather than providing evidence that every proposed capability is operating today.
Payment systems produce information at several stages: a customer attempts a transaction, a merchant receives confirmation, and the parties later match the payment against their records. The company’s stated aim is to draw on such signals to help inform decisions across that sequence.
Foloosi has also discussed the possibility of authorized AI agents interacting with payment infrastructure under defined permissions and controls.
Foloosi says it has secured in-principle approval for a Category III licence and is working toward the final decision. Its merchant figures and technology plans show how the company describes its business today and where it wants to take it.
