Foloosi, a UAE-born payments technology company, has received In-Principle Approval (IPA) from the Central Bank of the United Arab Emirates (CBUAE) for a Category III licence under the Retail Payment Services and Card Schemes (RPSCS) Regulation, the company announced on 16 September 2026. The approval moves Foloosi a step closer to a final operating licence, pending remaining conditions set by the regulator.
Founded by Omar Bin Brek and Mohan K, Foloosi has processed more than AED 7 billion in payment volume and serves over 10,000 merchants across the UAE. The company began as an online payment gateway and has since expanded into a wider merchant payments stack covering online payment acceptance, payment links, invoicing, subscriptions and recurring billing, QR payments, Tap to Phone, point-of-sale, and e-commerce operations.
Speaking of the development, Omar Bin Brek, Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer, Foloosi, 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.”
Alongside the regulatory milestone, Foloosi is positioning artificial intelligence as a core layer of its payments architecture rather than a bolt-on feature. The company said every transaction generates signals — behavioural, device-level, merchant-specific, risk-related and settlement data — and that its long-term roadmap is built around interpreting these signals in real time.
The planned capabilities include AI-powered transaction intelligence to flag unusual patterns, real-time fraud and risk scoring across payment and device signals, intelligent payment orchestration to route transactions more efficiently, merchant intelligence tools that convert payment data into business insights, and automated reconciliation and settlement tracking. Foloosi also flagged a longer-term push into agentic payment infrastructure, where authorised AI agents could interact with payment systems through defined permissions and controls.
Foloosi has previously been named to the UAE Future 100 list, which recognises companies contributing to the country’s emerging economic sectors. The company said it will continue working with the Central Bank to satisfy the remaining requirements for its final licence while investing further in payment infrastructure, fraud and risk technology, merchant intelligence, and security operations.
