How Pay10 Could Reshape UAE-India Business and Tourism
Pay10’s new UAE-India play is about more than payments
Pay10 is pushing deeper into the UAE-India fintech corridor at a moment when both markets are investing heavily in digital payments, open finance and smoother cross-border commerce. The company says it was founded in India in 2017, opened its headquarters in Dubai in 2023, and has since built out a regulated payments stack spanning India and the UAE. On its own corporate timeline, Pay10 says it holds Reserve Bank of India authorisation as an online payment aggregator, a cross-border payment aggregator and a prepaid payment instrument issuer, while in the UAE it has secured Central Bank of the UAE approvals under Stored Value Facility and Retail Payment Services & Card Schemes frameworks. In 2025, it also said it received approval for Open Finance Payment Initiation in the UAE.
That matters because the headline here is not simply that another fintech has launched a wallet or gateway. The more important story is that Pay10 is trying to sit where business travel, tourism spending, merchant collections and regulated payment initiation meet. For readers in Egypt tracking Gulf and South Asian market shifts, this is relevant because the UAE-India corridor is one of the region’s most active for trade, aviation, tourism and remittances, and the payments infrastructure that supports that corridor is becoming a competitive battleground.
Why the UAE launch is strategically important
Pay10’s biggest verifiable milestone is its move into the UAE’s open-finance architecture. On April 24, 2025, multiple reports said the company became the first fintech to go live in production on the Central Bank of the UAE’s Open Finance Framework, enabling it to provide payment initiation services, including variable recurring payments. Pay10’s own UAE materials later said it became the country’s first licensed third-party provider under that framework and completed the first live transaction on the platform in August 2025.
The regulatory angle is crucial. The Central Bank of the UAE says open finance is designed to support consent-driven, secure and customer-centric business models, while its rulebook states the framework includes transaction initiation capabilities across participating institutions. In simple terms, this creates the plumbing for regulated non-bank players to trigger payments directly from customer accounts with consent. For merchants, that can mean lower-cost acceptance options and potentially faster settlement. Pay10’s own merchant brand guidelines explicitly pitch “lower transaction fees” and “instant settlements” to businesses accepting its payment method.
How this could change business between India and the UAE
The business case becomes clearer when Pay10’s UAE capabilities are viewed alongside its India-facing cross-border products. Pay10 markets a service that allows global merchants to collect Indian rupees from customers in India and settle in foreign currency, and another that gives global merchants access to UPI, India’s dominant real-time retail payment rail. It also says its payment gateway supports UPI, cards, net banking and wallets, with instant settlements and automated flows for businesses.
For UAE businesses selling to Indian customers, that combination could reduce friction at checkout. A travel operator in Dubai, an Abu Dhabi attraction, or a hospitality brand targeting Indian customers typically wants three things: familiar payment methods, local-currency acceptance and compliance with settlement rules. Pay10 is effectively presenting itself as the connective layer that can bring Indian payment behaviour into UAE merchant operations without forcing customers into unfamiliar card flows. That is an inference based on the company’s published product stack and the UAE’s open-finance framework, but it is a logical one.
There is a broader market tailwind behind this strategy. NPCI International said in July 2024 that its partnership with Network International would enable UPI QR payment acceptance across merchants in the UAE, and it tied that push to growing Indian travel demand. The same release said Indian outbound travel was expected to reach 29.8 million in 2024 and projected 5.29 million arrivals from India into the UAE. India’s Press Information Bureau also said in October 2024 that the UAE is home to more than 3 million Indians and sees around 6 million Indian travellers every year.
What it means for tourism and travel spending
This is where Pay10 could have its most visible impact. Tourism businesses do not just need customers to arrive; they need them to pay easily for bookings, deposits, food, transport, shopping and repeat purchases. Payment friction is often invisible in strategy decks but obvious at the counter. If a visitor from India can pay a UAE merchant in a familiar flow, or if a UAE tourism business can collect from an Indian customer in rupees before travel, conversion can improve.
The UAE is clearly betting on tourism growth. Abu Dhabi’s media office said on April 27, 2025 that the emirate’s tourism sector was on track to contribute AED62 billion to the economy in 2025, up 13% from 2024, while supporting 255,000 jobs. It also identified India among Abu Dhabi’s best-performing source markets in the first quarter of 2025. One day later, the UAE Ministry of Economy and Tourism said the UAE and India were discussing new mechanisms to strengthen cooperation across sustainable, medical, cultural, adventure, shopping and MICE tourism.
In that context, a regulated fintech that can sit between tourism merchants and Indian payment demand is not a niche proposition. Hotels, destination management companies, attractions, airlines, malls and restaurant groups all benefit when payment acceptance matches visitor behaviour. Even recurring or scheduled payment features can matter in travel, where staged payments for packages, tours and corporate bookings are common. Pay10’s authorization to provide payment initiation services including variable recurring payment therefore has direct relevance for the tourism economy, especially on the B2B side.
Leadership and expansion signals
Pay10’s public leadership messaging suggests the company sees this as part of a wider international build-out rather than a single-market launch. On its corporate site, the company names Prabhpreet Singh Gill, known as Harry Gill, as founder and chairman, and Saad Kaleem as global CEO. It says the business now serves enterprise clients and is expanding across the Middle East, Africa, Asia and Europe.
What remains to be seen is scale. Pay10 has verifiable regulatory progress and a clear product narrative, but public data on transaction volumes, merchant counts in the UAE, or tourism-sector adoption has not been disclosed in the sources reviewed. That means the transformation story is credible in direction, but still early in measured market proof.
Why Egypt should watch this closely
For Egyptian readers, the lesson is not that Pay10 is a local New Cairo story; it is that the UAE and India are building a payments-and-tourism model that other high-traffic corridors may try to replicate. The closer fintech infrastructure gets to real travel and retail behaviour, the more it influences where visitors spend, how fast merchants settle, and how easily SMEs can serve foreign customers.
If Pay10 succeeds, its biggest achievement will not be launching another app. It will be helping turn a major India-UAE economic relationship into a smoother commercial experience on the ground: easier checkouts for tourists, cleaner collections for merchants, and more efficient money movement for businesses operating across two of the fastest-moving digital payments markets in the wider region.