The Central Bank of the UAE (CBUAE) and Abu Dhabi-based Presight have established a joint venture to implement AI-driven technology for the CBUAE’s Financial Infrastructure Transformation (FIT) programme.
The venture will support and maintain critical UAE financial systems, including the Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC), Instant Payments (Aani), Domestic Card Scheme (Jaywan), Real-Time Gross Settlement (RTGS), National Card Switch, and Open Finance service (Nebras).
The joint venture supports FIT’s first phase, launched in February 2023, which outlined nine key initiatives. These include instant payments, a domestic card scheme, CBDC, eKYC, financial cloud infrastructure, open finance, innovation hubs, and supervisory technology. FIT aims to transform the UAE’s financial ecosystem, supporting digital payment growth, regulatory efficiency and the development of a national digital economy by 2026.
FIT has already delivered the Instant Payments platform and Jaywan scheme, while work on the CBDC infrastructure is underway. The new joint venture now assumes responsibility for developing, maintaining and safeguarding these systems using sovereign AI technology.
Presight, part of the G42 group, holds a track record of deploying AI solutions for governments and enterprises across finance, public services and energy. It recently formed the AIQ joint venture with ADNOC and G42, securing a majority stake in AI-driven energy systems valued at $1.4 billion.
For CBUAE, this marks a substantial shift from outsourcing to private vendors. The central bank has previously worked with Accenture for supervisory technology and enterprise data management under SupTech and EDM initiatives. The new entity will be responsible for deploying AI across critical financial systems under central bank control, signalling a higher level of digital sovereignty.
As the venture progresses, it will face tests including securing central bank-grade operational resilience, regulatory robustness and smooth integration across legacy financial systems. Its success will be measured in how quickly the fintech ecosystem adopts new platforms, along with improvements in settlement speed, fraud detection, data transparency and cost efficiency.
The FIT programme remains on track for full integration by 2026 as part of the UAE’s digital economy strategy under “We the UAE 2031”.
