How Pay10 Could Reshape India-UAE Travel and Trade
Pay10’s new UAE-India fintech play is really about movement
Pay10 is not launching into the UAE-India corridor as just another payments brand. What makes the company notable is that it now sits on both sides of a strategically important route: it was founded in India in 2017, opened its global headquarters in Dubai in 2023, and says it has since built a regulated stack that spans domestic wallets, merchant acceptance, cross-border collections and Open Finance-enabled payments. That combination matters because the UAE and India are not simply large consumer markets; they are deeply linked by tourism, trade, migrant labour, retail flows and SME commerce.
For readers in Egypt, this is best understood as a regional payments story with practical implications. The UAE is a major aviation, retail and tourism gateway for the wider Middle East, while India is one of the world’s most important digital payments markets. Any platform that can reduce friction between the two has a chance to influence how travellers spend, how merchants collect money, and how smaller businesses handle international demand.
What Pay10 has actually built
According to Pay10’s own corporate timeline, the company received Stored Value Facility and Retail Payment Services and Card Schemes licences from the Central Bank of the UAE in 2024, along with a Payment Aggregator Cross Border licence from the Reserve Bank of India. In April 2025, Pay10 also announced it had become the first fintech to go live in production on the Central Bank of the UAE’s Open Finance Framework, giving it authorization to provide payment initiation services, including variable recurring payments.
On the consumer side in the UAE, Pay10 says its app supports wallet functions, QR-code payments, peer-to-peer transfers, merchant payments, bill payments, utility recharges and bank-account linking. Its terms and FAQs also show that the platform supports Wages Protection System salary flows and a “Send Abroad” feature for remittances from the UAE to supported countries.
On the India side, Pay10 promotes UPI-based consumer payments and a cross-border merchant product that lets global merchants accept payments from Indian customers in rupees while receiving settlement in foreign currency through an Authorized Dealer bank corridor under India’s regulatory framework. The company says this setup is designed for overseas merchants that want to collect from India without creating a local entity there.
Why this could matter for business in the UAE and India
1) Easier collections for merchants selling across borders
The clearest business case is merchant acceptance. A UAE hotel, attraction operator, medical tourism provider or retailer targeting Indian customers usually wants two things: familiar payment methods for the customer, and predictable settlement for the business. Pay10’s UPI-for-global-merchants product is built around that exact pain point, allowing Indian customers to pay in INR while merchants can be settled in permitted foreign currencies including AED.
That is particularly relevant in sectors where Indian demand is already significant, such as aviation-linked retail, hospitality, destination weddings, events, outpatient healthcare and premium shopping. For SMEs, the value is not only conversion at checkout, but potentially lower operational complexity when compared with piecing together separate providers for local acceptance, currency handling and compliance. This last point is an inference based on Pay10’s integrated product positioning and licensing footprint, rather than a disclosed merchant cost comparison.
2) Stronger digital tools for UAE-based small businesses
Pay10’s UAE merchant proposition includes a business wallet and integration methods for accepting payments digitally. Combined with the app’s wallet, QR and account-linking functions, this suggests a model aimed not just at enterprise clients but at smaller merchants that want quick onboarding and mobile-first acceptance. In a tourism-heavy economy like the UAE, that can be useful for restaurants, boutique stores, transport operators, salons, kiosks and excursion providers that increasingly serve international guests expecting instant digital payments.
For Egyptian businesses watching Gulf trends, this is also a reminder that fintech competition is shifting from simple card acceptance to broader ecosystems: wallets, payroll, bill pay, remittance and account-to-account payments all in one regulated stack.
3) A potentially better corridor for recurring B2B and platform payments
Pay10’s April 24, 2025 announcement is important because Open Finance payment initiation can eventually support direct bank-based payments, including recurring or variable recurring payment use cases, once the ecosystem matures and more institutions are fully connected. Later, on December 30, 2025, Pay10 and First Abu Dhabi Bank said they had gone live under the UAE’s AlTareq Open Finance initiative in a controlled live usage phase, confirming production connectivity and operational readiness.
For business, that opens the door to smoother account-to-account flows for subscriptions, supplier payments, platform commerce and treasury-linked use cases. The broader commercial transformation will depend on scale, bank participation and merchant adoption, but the infrastructure milestone itself is real and recent.
How Pay10 could transform tourism between India and the UAE
Tourism is where the Pay10 story becomes especially tangible. Indian travellers to the UAE, whether for holidays, shopping, family visits, medical care or short business trips, are used to fast mobile payments at home. If a UAE merchant can accept a payment flow that feels familiar to that traveller, the transaction becomes quicker and less intimidating, especially for mid-value purchases made on the move.
That matters in everyday travel moments: paying for an attraction ticket, settling a hotel add-on, buying duty-free-adjacent retail, booking a desert tour or making a last-minute restaurant payment. The less time travellers spend on card failures, cash withdrawals or exchange-rate uncertainty, the more likely they are to complete spontaneous purchases. This is an inference, but it follows directly from the user experience benefits described in Pay10’s wallet and merchant-payment materials.
There is also a workforce and visiting-friends-and-relatives angle. Pay10’s UAE materials show support for salary payments under WPS and for remittances through “Send Abroad.” In corridors with large expatriate communities, financial behaviour often overlaps with travel behaviour: a worker receiving salary in a wallet may also use the same ecosystem to shop locally, send money home, or pay for a relative’s travel-related expense.
The people behind the expansion
Pay10 identifies Prabhpreet Singh Gill as founder and chairman and Saad Kaleem as global CEO. The company says Harry Gill built Pay10 to focus on interoperable global payments, while Kaleem is leading its expansion strategy. No official Instagram handle for either executive could be verified from the searched official and reputable sources, so none is included here.
What Egyptian readers should take from this
This article does not belong in a local New Cairo or Fifth Settlement frame because the underlying subject is not Egyptian. It is a global business-and-tourism fintech story centered on the UAE and India. Still, it is highly relevant for Egypt-based readers tracking regional consumer trends, payment innovation and travel spending behaviour across the Gulf.
The key takeaway is simple: Pay10 is trying to turn regulation into an everyday payments bridge. If it executes well, its biggest impact may not be in flashy headlines but in the ordinary moments that shape business and tourism alike: a merchant onboarding faster, a traveller checking out more easily, an SME collecting from India without setting up locally, or a worker using one app for salary, shopping and remittance. In fast-moving corridors like UAE-India, those seemingly small frictions can add up to major commercial change.