Spare Extends Pay-by-Bank to UAE Investment Accounts

Spare has agreed to embed its account-to-account payment rails into Tabadulat, a UAE Shariah-compliant brokerage, letting investors fund and withdraw from trading accounts directly from their bank rather than via card. The deal, announced on 12 August 2026, pushes Open Finance in the UAE past its consumer-payments origins and into the funding layer of retail investment platforms, a segment where settlement speed and verified sources of funds carry direct regulatory weight.

What does the Spare and Tabadulat deal actually change?

The integration swaps card-based deposits and withdrawals for regulated bank-to-bank transfers. Investors on Tabadulat can move money between their bank and brokerage account using Open Finance payment rails, with deposits and withdrawals settling in near real time rather than on the multi-day cycle typical of card funding. For an active trader, the practical gain is faster access to capital when a market opportunity is time sensitive, and quicker withdrawal when they want to take money off the table.

The cost angle is the quieter driver. Card acceptance carries interchange fees that, for credit cards, typically run between 1.15% and 2.60% of transaction value on published Visa and Mastercard schedules, before scheme and acquirer markups are added. On a brokerage funding a high volume of deposits, shifting even part of that flow to account-to-account rails converts a percentage-based charge into a small flat fee. Tabadulat, which already markets 0% commission on its Shariah-compliant US equity trades, has a clear incentive to strip cost out of the funding path as well.

How does this strengthen compliance for a regulated brokerage?

Spare's infrastructure verifies that the bank account used for a deposit or withdrawal matches the customer's verified identity, tying the money movement to a confirmed source of funds. For a Category 3A entity regulated by the Financial Services Regulatory Authority of Abu Dhabi Global Market, that matters: source-of-funds verification and fraud controls are supervisory expectations, not optional features. Routing funding through rails that bind each transaction to a verified account reduces the manual burden of meeting those obligations.

The integration also runs through a single API, letting Tabadulat initiate account-to-account payments without maintaining separate connections to multiple banks. For a young platform, that removes a substantial engineering and partnership overhead.

Why is Open Finance moving into UAE investment platforms now?

The timing tracks two parallel build-outs. Spare secured in-principle approval from the Central Bank of the UAE to operate under the country's Open Finance framework in mid-2025, and holds Account Information Service Provider and Payment Initiation Service Provider licences from the Central Bank of Bahrain. Founded in Riyadh in 2019 by Dalal AlRayes and Saurabh Shah, the firm raised $5 million in a pre-Series A round in September 2025 and operates across Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the UAE, and Kuwait.

Tabadulat, for its part, is early in its own regulatory life. Founded in 2024 by Samy Mohamad, formerly of Morgan Stanley, alongside Ali Abdulkadir Ali and Ahmed Said, it received full FSRA authorisation as a Category 3A entity only in December 2025, on total committed capital of $3.3 million. The brokerage describes itself as the UAE's first free halal trading platform, a first-mover claim it makes for its own positioning, and is a member of the Accounting and Auditing Organization for Islamic Financial Institutions. A partnership that lowers funding cost and hardens compliance is a natural fit for a platform building its infrastructure from a standing start.

Adoption data cited around such deals should be read with care. Spare and Tabadulat point to a figure that 83% of UAE consumers using account-to-account payments have maintained or increased usage over the prior year. That statistic comes from Mastercard's New Payments Index published in 2022, not a current survey, so it reflects sentiment from several years ago rather than the present state of the market.

Why This Matters to FinanceX Readers

Open Finance in the UAE is climbing the value chain, from consumer data access and merchant payments into the funding rails of regulated investment platforms.

For investors watching regional fintech, the signal is that infrastructure providers like Spare are embedding themselves at the transaction layer of wealth and trading products, where volume and regulatory stickiness build defensible revenue.

For anyone tracking the halal investing segment specifically, the deal shows a newly licensed brokerage prioritising cost and compliance in its funding path, an early indicator of how thin-margin, commission-free models intend to operate sustainably.