Abu Dhabi Islamic Bank (ADIB) is getting BNPL-ready as it rolls out the UAE’s first virtual ‘buy now pay later’ prepaid card. The largest Shari’ah-compliant lender in Abu Dhabi has partnered with Dubai-based Spotii to bring the BNPL product to market.
Spotii was founded in 2020 as a BNPL-play and is currently operational in KSA and UAE with over 650 merchants on its platform and another partnership already with Mastercard (MA). The ADIB-Spotii collab will allow users to make in-store and online purchases through a virtual card and stagger the repayments across multiple zero-interest installments. When ready, customers will be able to settle their purchases through topping up their virtual card on the Spotii app. While Spotii has been adding merchants left and right to its platform, it’s still nowhere near the scale of ADIB, given the bank’s presence across six MENA markets brings a strategic value-add to the table.
Why it matters
While the partnership pushes Spotii forward in the rapidly-growing MENA BNPL space, it also ties into ADIB’s recent digitization push. Despite news of the collab, though, ADIB’s stock was down by 1.4% at market close yesterday.
