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Checkout.com Brings Visa Direct Push-To-Card To The UAE
The payment company is the first acquirer in the UAE to launch Visa Direct’s solution, enabling safe, instant money transfers.
Checkout.com has taken the UAE a step closer to its goal of a fully digital economy by becoming the first acquirer in the country to offer Visa Direct’s Push-to-Card solution. The new service will streamline money transfers for both businesses and consumers, enabling near-instant transactions across local and international markets.
Visa Direct connects over 190 markets and supports over 8.5 billion endpoints, including cards, bank accounts, and digital wallets. Push-to-Card transactions enhance efficiency for business users and consumers by allowing money to be sent quickly and easily to eligible Visa cards while leveraging the company’s secure network for reliability.
“Visa Direct is transforming the way money moves globally, and we are excited to see Checkout.com leverage this technology to meet the evolving demands of businesses and individuals alike by offering them a faster, more convenient, and secure way to send and receive funds,” said Shahebaz Khan, Senior Vice President and Head of Commercial and Money Movement Solutions, CEMEA.
The UAE has been at the forefront of digital payment adoption, driven by a national push toward a cashless economy. Remo Giovanni Abbondandolo, General Manager for MENA at Checkout.com, emphasized this shift: “By providing seamless, secure, and real-time payout capabilities, we’re empowering merchants with the agility to thrive in this fast-evolving landscape, while effectively meeting the growing consumer demand for speed and convenience. The Push-to-Card solution not only reinforces our commitment to powering payment performance but also showcases our agility in bringing yet another innovation to the UAE market.”
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Checkout.com’s latest MENA eCommerce data highlights the region’s increasing engagement with financial technologies, with around 80% of consumers participating in activities beyond basic online payments, such as money transfers and personal wealth management. The growing demand for real-time financial transactions has made fast, seamless payment solutions a priority.
To meet this demand, Account Funding Transactions (AFTs) have gained traction in the UAE. By integrating AFTs with Visa’s Push-to-Card services, Checkout.com is helping merchants offer secure, real-time account top-ups. Currently processing over one million AFTs per month with Visa, Checkout.com is now playing a leading role in modernizing financial transactions in the region.
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Abu Dhabi’s Robot Kitchen Is Serving Up Biryani, Not Burgers
Circus SE wants to put a tiny automated factory inside the buildings where Gulf residents live and work, bypassing part of last-mile delivery.
The most telling thing about a new autonomous kitchen now running in Abu Dhabi’s Marina Square is what it won’t cook:
“We don’t do fast food,” says Nikolas Bullwinkel, Founder and CEO of Circus SE. “We’ve actively decided not to build a machine that can only do burgers”.
Instead, the CA-1 system is built around pot-based cooking: curries, pastas, soups and rice dishes. After experimenting with highly personalized recipes, Circus deliberately leaned back toward recognizable food. “We’re going with a chicken biryani because you know it,” Bullwinkel says of the AED 40 dish.
The Germany-based robotics and food technology company operates across eight countries, and Abu Dhabi is its first deployment outside Europe. More locations are expected there and in Dubai.
In Germany, its units can be placed in supermarkets, gas stations, airports and hospitals. In the Gulf, Bullwinkel wants them inside residential and office buildings, replacing some of the complexity of last-mile delivery. “We’re basically bringing a very tiny factory a few square meters into your building,” he says. Catering company Royal Prestige supplies the ingredients and knowledge of local tastes.
The CA-1 manages up to 36 refrigerated ingredient silos alongside automated induction cooking, robotic plating and a self-cleaning dishwasher. Two robotic arms move ingredients through the system with minimal human intervention. It can produce up to 120 hot meals an hour, and a meal such as rice and curry can take around three to four minutes.
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Five cameras and multiple sensors monitor heat, temperature and consistency, an attempt to approximate what a chef perceives. “You can hear something gets burned, you can smell it, you can see it at some point,” Bullwinkel says. CircusOS, the company’s operating system, adjusts recipes in real time.
You might think of the platform as a threat to kitchen staff, but Bullwinkel frames Circus as a way for chefs to develop recipes and distribute them at scale. With that being said, rising labor costs and shortages are also part of his case for automation.
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