Andrea Cianchetti, Chief Products Officer, Al Etihad Payments, said: “We are very excited to announce that Jaywan is now accepted through the Visa Acceptance Platform, which materially increases online acceptance for Jaywan cards in the UAE. Jaywan was established to give the UAE a national card scheme with the scale, acceptance, and capabilities the country’s payment needs require. Enabling Jaywan on the Visa Acceptance Platform embeds the UAE’s domestic card scheme further into the infrastructure supporting digital commerce. It expands the ability of merchants, acquirers, and payment service providers to accept Jaywan online and adds capabilities such as card-on-file and recurring payments. That takes us closer to making Jaywan a natural part of how consumers pay and businesses accept payments across the UAE.”
Fadi Moukaddem, Visa’s Regional General Manager for UAE, Kuwait and Qatar, added: “We are proud to continue to build on our collaboration with Al Etihad Payments by making Jaywan available on the Visa Acceptance Platform. By enabling participating merchants, acquirers and payment service providers to support Jaywan through the platform, we are helping expand payment choice while delivering the secure, reliable and seamless experiences consumers and businesses expect."
The two organizations first teamed up on Jaywan in March 2025, when Al Etihad Payments and Visa agreed to introduce co-badged “Jaywan-Visa” debit and prepaid cards carrying both logos. Under that agreement, domestic transactions were to run through UAESWITCH, the national card switch, and cross-border payments outside the GCC through VisaNet, Visa's global network.
Cards carrying both brands, Visa said at the time, could be used abroad and online wherever its network reaches, which it put at more than 150 million merchant partners in 200 countries and territories. Dr. Saeeda Jaffar, Visa's Senior Vice President and Group Country Manager for the GCC, said then that around 30% of payments were still made with cash.
The latest step works on the other side of the checkout. The 2025 deal concerned the cards consumers carry, while the platform update decides whether an online business connected to Visa can accept a Jaywan card at all.
Nationwide issuance only got under way in July 2026, when the UAE began nationwide issuance of Jaywan cards in phases through banks, licensed financial institutions and exchange houses. Network International said at that point that it had enabled Jaywan payments across its e-commerce merchant network.
Mastercard's merchant tools followed in September, when noon payments switched on online Jaywan acceptance through Mastercard Gateway, offered via Mastercard Merchant Cloud. There, Mastercard supplied the gateway connection rather than replacing Jaywan as the scheme used for the payment.
Al Etihad Payments has also been pushing the scheme beyond the UAE. In August 2026, a memorandum of understanding with UnionPay International set out a route for mono-badged Jaywan cards to be accepted on UnionPay's network. Once in place, that would open more than 100 million points of sale and 1.8 million ATMs in over 183 countries and regions to cardholders, with a pilot in mainland China coming first.
With Visa's and Mastercard's merchant platforms now both carrying Jaywan, online sellers in the UAE may find it simpler to add the domestic scheme without building a separate link to it. Support for stored cards and repeat billing could matter most to subscription services, where a card that can't be kept on file is hard to use.
