News
Payment Experts Payrails Team With Ride Hailing App inDrive
The partnership solves the complexities of integrating various regional payment service providers into the global mobility service.
Payment platform Payrails has announced a strategic collaboration with inDrive, the world’s second-most-downloaded ride-hailing app. The partnership is already helping the California-based inDrive overcome the complexities of integrating various payment service providers and alternative payment methods across different regions, including MENA.
Payrails’ solution is provider agnostic, and features dynamic payment routing, and extended coverage of alternative (regional) payment methods. The technology is complex, but the main takeaway is that inDrive has already seen an 11% increase in card approval rates and significantly boosted conversions, enhancing profits for inDrive and improving income security for its workers.
Payrails also delivers a streamlined experience for inDrive’s developers by offering a single API (application programming interface) eliminating the need for multiple individual integrations with different regional payment providers and payment methods.
Vasiliy Everstov, Head of Fintech at inDrive, expressed enthusiasm about the results, stating: “Partnering with Payrails empowers us to activate all of our key payment objectives for the business across our top priority markets. Together, we are driving tech innovation in the mobility industry and unlocking new opportunities for drivers and consumers alike”.
Also Read: A Guide To Digital Payment Methods In The Middle East
Orkhan Abdullayev, Co-Founder and CEO of Payrails echoed this sentiment, remarking, “Collaborating with inDrive to revolutionize global payment processing underscores our commitment to providing innovative solutions in the MENA region and beyond that address the evolving needs of large enterprises. Our aim is to set new benchmarks of excellence for payment solutions across key industries worldwide”.
Through the collaboration, inDrive can now access and automate the optimal payment routes in each market at the lowest cost, driving efficiency and profitability in a highly competitive sector.
News
UAE-Built Falcon-H1 Arabic Leads LLM Benchmarks
The lean Emirati-built language model beats larger global systems and puts Arabic at the center of training.
Abu Dhabi’s Technology Innovation Institute has released an Arabic-first large language model that tops global test boards, an uncommon edge for a region long served by English-centric systems.
Falcon-H1 Arabic comes in 3B, 7B and 34B versions. The flagship posts 75.36% accuracy on comprehensive Arabic tasks and ranks first on the Open Arabic LLM Leaderboard. It also outperforms Meta’s Llama-70B and Alibaba’s Qwen-72B while using less than half their parameters. The smallest model beats Microsoft’s Phi-4 Mini by ten percentage points on equivalent benchmarks.
Arabic remains hard territory for AI. Flexible word order, dense morphology and constant switching between regional dialects and Modern Standard Arabic leave many global models missing context or tone. Academic research has pointed to a shortage of annotated datasets for dialect and informal speech. The impact shows up in classrooms, call centers and government portals where Arabic chatbots lag their English counterparts.
TII trained Falcon-H1 Arabic on formal writing, dialects and culturally grounded content. Beyond scores, it handles practical use: long conversations, reasoning rather than literal translation, and inputs of up to 192,000 words — enough for medical records or legal filings.
“The aim is innovation that is accessible, relevant, and impactful,” said Faisal Al Bannai, Adviser to the UAE President and Secretary-General of the Advanced Technology Research Council.
Also Read: Governata Raises $4M For Saudi AI Data-Governance Push
Arabic is spoken by more than 450 million people across over 20 countries, yet has often been treated as a secondary language for foundation models. The UAE move signals a push to flip that logic and build Arabic-native stacks rather than wait for global systems to improve.
Falcon models have led their categories since 2023. With H1 Arabic, TII is offering free access via chat.falconllm.tii.ae for developers, media, healthcare and public-sector users looking to automate in natural Arabic.
As the region continues to invest in sovereign computing and data localization, the addition of Falcon-H1 Arabic adds a powerful tool built for the native language, instead of an afterthought attached to an English-trained system.
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