UAE Morocco Instant Payment Network: What Changed
The UAE and Morocco signed two memoranda of understanding on October 3. The agreements create a framework for assessment, not a live payment rail.
UAE Morocco instant payment network: what changed
The first MoU covers banking supervision and Islamic finance. It provides for information-sharing on banks and financial institutions, coordination of supervisory practices, and work on Shariah governance frameworks for cross-border structures including trade finance and infrastructure investment.
The second MoU covers an assessment of whether the two countries’ instant payment platforms, national card switches, and financial messaging systems can be directly linked. It also covers CBDC development cooperation and regulatory frameworks for crypto-assets and stablecoins.
Both the UAE’s Aani platform and Morocco’s GSIMT instant transfer service use ISO 20022. That removes a messaging compatibility hurdle, but currency conversion, liquidity, AML and KYC alignment, and settlement rules still need to be addressed.
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Who it affects
The Central Bank of the UAE and Bank Al-Maghrib will assess the technical and regulatory conditions for a potential link. Moroccan workers and residents in the UAE are among the users in view, with the source identifying roughly 800,000 people and citing an average remittance cost of 8% for African diaspora transfers.
The proposed infrastructure could support business settlements, FDI flows, and card payments, but the source does not establish that any of those functions are available today.
What to do now
No consumer timeline has been set, and users should continue using existing transfer operators in the interim.
Source link
Read the source report on the UAE-Morocco payment agreements.
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