Vice Chairman of China UnionPay Mr. Chen Zhi (right) and CEO of Mashreq Bank Mr. Abdul Aziz Al Ghurair (left) attended the signing ceremony

UnionPay International announced today to have signed a cooperation agreement with Mashreq Bank, the largest private bank in UAE. As agreed, the Bank will enable all of its 400 or so online merchants to accept UnionPay cards in half a year. These merchants cover all types, including hotels and online duty-free stores. Early this year, Mashreq Bank has taken the lead in accepting UnionPay Mobile QuickPass, and now 23,000 merchants in the UAE have accepted the service. Mr. Chen Zhi, Vice Chairman of China UnionPay and Mr. Abdul Aziz Al Ghurair, CEO of Mashreq Bank attended the signing ceremony.

The UAE is an important hub in the Middle East along the “One Belt, One Road”. Almost all the ATMs and POS terminals in the UAE accept UnionPay cards, and the official website of Emirates and Etihad support UnionPay Online Payment for ticket purchasing. Over the past year, UnionPay International also cooperated with MINT, a financial service group in the UAE, to have issued 200,000 UnionPay cards as the local people’s pay cards. According to the latest data, in the first three quarters of 2017, the transaction volume of UnionPay in the UAE grew by about 200% year-on-year.

Based on the mature offline acceptance of UnionPay in the UAE, UnionPay International is speeding up the roll-out of its innovative products in the country. At the beginning of this year, Mashreq Bank has enabled all of its NFC-accepting POS terminals to accept UnionPay Mobile QuickPass, which made the UAE the first Middle East country that has launched this flexible mobile payment service. This time, the two parties expand their cooperation to online payment, enabling the official website of Jumeirah, Damac, Dubai Duty Free and many other renowned merchants to accept the online payment with UnionPay cards.

Mr. Chen Zhi, said, the UAE is a significant hub that connects the East and the West. With the implementation of the Belt and Road Initiative, many Chinese people are willing to visit the UAE, bring more demands for cross-border payment services. In view of this trend, UnionPay is committed to strengthening its cooperation with the major institutions in the UAE to jointly offer more payment options for our customers, improve payment service capacity, and support the economic and financial cooperation as well as personnel exchanges between the two countries. UnionPay has done quite a lot exploration in payment innovation and is willing to carry out cooperation in the fields of online payment and QR Code payment with partners in the UAE.

According to Mr. Ghurair, China is the biggest trade partner of the UAE, and we believe that there’ll be more and more Chinese visitors come here with their UnionPay cards. Mashreq Bank is the first commercial bank in the UAE that has accepted UnionPay cards. On the solid foundation of cooperation, we are willing to deepen our cooperation with UnionPay in payment innovation, so as to deliver better payment experiences to our clients and to realize a win-win situation.

So far, UnionPay is present in 11 countries and regions in the Middle East. UnionPay is already accepted at all the ATMs and POS terminals in Jordan. In Saudi Arabia and Qatar, about 50% of merchants and 40% of ATMs accept UnionPay cards. UnionPay cards are also issued in Yemen and Jordan, and the number of cards issued is growing rapidly.