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Stake Powers Instant Payouts With Checkout.com Pay To Card
The new feature lets investors in the UAE, KSA, and UK receive real estate returns in minutes — cutting withdrawal times to under 10 minutes.
Stake, a leading digital real estate investment platform, has unveiled Pay to Card, a next-generation withdrawal feature built on Checkout.com’s global payment infrastructure. The integration enables investors to have dividends and returns credited directly to their bank cards — often within minutes — dramatically reducing the traditional multi-day payout process.
After a successful pilot in May involving over 200 users, some investors reported receiving their funds in under 10 minutes. Ricardo Brizido, CPTO and Co-Founder of Stake, emphasized the importance of speed and reliability: “With Pay to Card, we’re eliminating unnecessary delays and putting returns in our investors’ hands almost instantly. This feature was built to directly solve one of the most common pain points in real estate investing, and it’s already driving strong results”.
The feature launch coincides with rapid growth in real-time finance across the Middle East. Checkout.com’s “State of Digital Commerce in MENA 2025” report highlights a 388% year-on-year surge in Account Funding Transactions (AFTs) in the UAE, reflecting strong demand for immediate payout solutions. The same study recorded a 176% increase in total processing volume from 2023 to 2024 and noted that daily online transactions have jumped 320% since 2020.
Since its 2021 debut, Stake has facilitated over AED 1 billion in property transactions, advancing its mission to democratize real estate investment in high-growth markets. By integrating Pay to Card, Stake reinforces its commitment to customer-centric innovation and operational transparency.
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Remo Giovanni Abbondandolo, General Manager for MENA at Checkout.com, praised the collaboration: “Stake has always led with customer-first financial experiences. Together, we’re meeting the expectations of a region that is no longer just digital-first, but real-time-first. Pay to Card exemplifies how modern payment infrastructure can directly solve investor pain points”.
Pay to Card is now available to all Stake users in the United Arab Emirates, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and the United Kingdom. By slashing withdrawal times from days to minutes, Stake and Checkout.com are setting a new standard for seamless, on-demand real estate investing.
News
At I/O 2026, Sundar Pichai Concedes AI Must Deliver Real Value
Gemini 3.5, a personal agent called Spark, agentic shopping, and Android XR eyewear are all aimed at making AI feel useful, not just impressive.
Google’s annual I/O developer conference (I/O 2026) has recently become a status update on the same question: can the company turn its AI spending into products people use every day? This year, chief executive Sundar Pichai described Google as being in a phase of hyper progress, while conceding this is the part of the cycle where people want to see real value in the products they use on a day-to-day basis.
The strategy on display was to push agents — AI systems that act on a user’s behalf — into nearly every Google product at once. Search now has an “intelligent search box” that returns generated explainer videos alongside links. Gmail, Docs, YouTube and Maps are gaining their own agent layers, including a Docs Live feature that turns spoken instructions into drafted text with citations.
Two new models, Gemini 3.5 and a cheaper Gemini 3.5 Flash, arrived the same day. Google says 900 million people now use Gemini, and that more than 50 billion images have been generated with it. The pricing tier names are likely to confuse buyers: a new AI Ultra plan launches at $100 a month, while the older Gemini AI Ultra drops from $250 to $200.
The flashier announcements were Gemini Omni, a video generator pitched as a more realistic answer to OpenAI’s discontinued Sora 2, and Gemini Spark, a personal agent that handles recurring tasks across a user’s Google account. A new universal shopping cart lets agents complete purchases across multiple retailers from inside Google itself, placing the company between the merchant and the buyer, and also owning the checkout.
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Google also confirmed its Android XR eyewear, built with Samsung and frames from Warby Parker and Gentle Monster. Audio-only glasses ship this autumn; a display-equipped version, which would superimpose live translations into the wearer’s field of view, is still in development. Both sets translate, however only the display version shows you the result.
What Pichai did not resolve is the bargain underneath all this. An agent is only useful to the degree it knows your calendar, your inbox, your shopping history and your physical surroundings. Google has now confirmed that, in time, the same context may carry advertising.
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