PhonePe secures a UAE Central Bank licence, marking its first international expansion and launch outside India.

The company will now be able to run its own operations in the UAE instead of simply letting Indian travellers use UPI there, which is how things have worked until now.

Founder and CEO Sameer Nigam announced the development on September 9 at the Global Fintech Fest 2026 in Mumbai.

He described it as the start of PhonePe’s next phase after spending its first decade focused only on the Indian market.

Once the licence is operational, PhonePe plans to roll out a digital wallet, prepaid gift cards, and remittance services for the UAE.

It also intends to help local merchants accept digital payments, which could eventually let UAE residents pay using their own point-of-sale devices, and send money to India just as easily.

This builds on ground PhonePe had already covered. UPI is accepted in the UAE, along with countries like Singapore, France, Qatar, Sri Lanka and Mauritius.

But those arrangements were built for Indians paying while abroad, not for a local customer base. A licence changes that.

It gives PhonePe the ability to build products for people who actually live in the UAE. The UAE update landed alongside a separate announcement with Visa.

The two companies are introducing tap-to-pay support on Android phones, cross-border QR scanning in 14 overseas markets, and a feature called Smart Accept, which turns a merchant’s smartphone into a card-payment terminal without needing separate hardware.

PhonePe remains India’s largest UPI app, with more than 71.5 crore registered users and an acceptance network of over 5 crore merchants, as of July 2026.

Nigam said the broader goal is to build a genuinely global business over the next decade, not treat the UAE as a one-off.

No formal launch date has been announced yet for when UAE operations will go live.

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