Why UAE gains from Brics’ bilateral payments push, even if it stays a “cross-web” rather than a bloc-wide network

For all the talk of “Brics Pay,” the New Delhi summit earlier this month made clear that the bloc’s alternative to the USD system will be a patchwork, not a platform. Progress in reducing reliance on the USD in trade with Brics members is real, but it’s happening through a “cross-web” of bilateral payment corridors as opposed to a bloc-wide network, Kenneth Stibler, founder and director of the Center for Emerging Economies, tells EnterpriseAM. The good news: The UAE sits in the middle of it.

What happened at the summit: The New Delhi Declaration dropped any mention of a common Brics currency or a formal effort to replace the USD. Instead, it backs interoperable payment systems and trade settled in local currencies, and it stresses that members have divergent national priorities with no “one-size-fits-all approach.” It names no preferred messaging standard or clearing house, which leaves room for bilateral links between systems already running in the larger member economies.

One bloc, four agendas

The Brics bloc can be divided into four camps, Stibler tells us, each with its own reason to want alternatives to the USD:

• Russia and Iran see the effort as “a survival network” against sanctions;
• China cares about sovereignty from a geoeconomic angle;
• India and the Gulf want lower costs, cutting out an expensive US correspondent banking system;
• and countries with chronic USD shortages, such as Egypt and Ethiopia, see it as a practical way to ease that shortfall.

Because those goals don’t line up, the real work happens bilaterally. Bilateral channels have multiplied across the bloc, especially since Western sanctions hit Russia in 2022. Around 96% of India-Russia trade now settles through INR-RUB arrangements, according to Sberbank’s head in India, and almost all Russia-China trade is settled in CNY and RUB. Elsewhere, Russia and Iran have been linking their Mir and Shetab card systems in stages; China and Brazil agreed in 2023 to settle trade in CNY and BRL; and the Reserve Bank of India has approved 156 special INR accounts for 123 correspondent banks from 30 countries. Much of this is driven by sanctions, not efficiency.

The UAE’s corridors fall into the cost-cutting camp, where even small savings add up. The UAE’s non-oil trade with Brics members topped USD 312 bn in 2025, up 28.5% from USD 243 bn a year earlier, accounting for roughly 31% of the country’s total non-oil foreign trade. Today, a payment between the UAE and India can pass through two correspondent banks, each taking a cut.

With India, the framework is in place but usage is thin: The Reserve Bank of India and the Central Bank of the UAE (CBUAE) signed a local currency settlement MoU in July 2023. Take-up since has been slow — around 15% of trade between India and the UAE successfully bypasses the USD and is invoiced in local currencies. The plumbing is still expanding: in May, Aani operator Al Etihad Payments picked Montran to build an international gateway, starting with a link to India’s Unified Payments Interface, designed so that each new corridor doesn’t need its own bespoke integration.

With China, the links are more advanced. The UAE made its first cross-border digital AED payment to China via mBridge in January 2024. Last November, it launched the Jisr CBDC platform with a live payment to China, linked its instant payment system to China’s for 24/7 transfers, and rolled out a co-branded Jaywan-UnionPay prepaid card. More central banks are expected to join Jisr this year.

Why the UAE sits at the center: The UAE’s corridors connect to each other. Domestic card scheme Jaywan was built on India’s RuPay technology and now carries a co-branded card with China’s UnionPay, and Aani’s new gateway is designed as a hub that each new corridor plugs into.

The AED also works as a bridge currency: Because the AED is pegged to the USD, the UAE acts as “a source of USD liquidity into this broader system,” Stibler says, so it doesn’t end up holding currencies it can’t use. That’s why Indian refiners have paid for Russian oil in AED rather than INR. And trade already flows through it: Brics members took 28% of the UAE’s re-exports last year. “The UAE benefits from being the center of this network as opposed to being one equal member in a broader de-dollarized ecosystem,” Stibler says.

Where the technology stands

The most finished piece of alternative payment infrastructure sits outside Brics altogether. That is mBridge, the multi-central bank digital currency platform. The Bank for International Settlements led mBridge until it stepped back in October 2024, as we covered at the time. It remains in pilot with no commercial launch date.

Saudi Arabia has stepped back. The Saudi Central Bank told the Financial Times it completed its mBridge proof of concept in May 2025 and has not been a participating member since, though a second source told the paper that Riyadh still engages with the platform more discreetly. The CBUAE, a founding member, remains an active participant alongside the central banks of China, Thailand, Mongolia, Macau, and Hong Kong. While it’s unclear why the Kingdom stepped back, it could be a sign of “some pressure behind the scenes,” Stibler says, pointing to the US’ tariff threats against countries that work with a rival currency — something “very few countries actually want to [manage].”

The problem is geopolitical, not technological. The UAE’s Aani “is based on modern ISO 20022 payment standards” and “should not be overly challenging to integrate into a multilateral payment system,” Nick Maynard, VP of Research at Juniper Research, tells us. Across the bloc, though, he rates readiness as “generally low,” since not every member uses ISO 20022 and sanctions complicate things. Ultimately, “the barrier to success or failure with a lot of these is not a function of the technologies themselves,” Stibler says. The real question is less “whether countries can send a payment message” than “whether they can make binding multilateral commitments around it,” he said in written comments.

Banks set the speed limit

US enforcement against Iran-linked banking in the UAE has stepped up since late August, when the Treasury launched Operation Economic Outcast to cut off Iran’s remaining financial lifelines. Days later, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network proposed cutting Banque Misr’s UAE branches off from US correspondent banking, estimating they processed about USD 1.8 bn for 103 companies potentially linked to Iranian shadow banking networks. The Office of Foreign Assets Control also sanctioned the manager of Iran’s Bank Melli’s Dubai branch. This week, the CBUAE barred Bank Melli, Iran’s biggest lender, from trade finance and fund transfers, following the UAE’s decision last month to sever trade and financial ties with Iran.

Enforcement actions like these have “a chilling effect on any appetite to tie into something where Iran would be a counterparty,” Stibler says, making any bloc-wide system with Iran as a member a hard sell to Emirati banks — at least for now.

Crypto and fintech aren’t a way around that

Maynard sees an opening for the UAE as a DeFi hub, noting that “Russia has already extensively used cryptocurrencies to evade sanctions.” Stibler sees limitations to that: crypto “still has the type of KYC requirements and sanctions exposure,” and 2026 “has proven that pretty substantially, that you cannot rely on a Tether, for example.” The UAE has been drawing its own lines on digital assets.

A Financial Times investigation published this week shows the limits of those workarounds. A7, a Russian payments fintech backed by sanctioned state lender Promsvyazbank, used front companies and forged invoices to move some USD 6.9 bn through global banks, including Standard Chartered, Citigroup, and JPMorgan. When Standard Chartered began holding payments, A7 moved more of its activity to the UAE, where 17 entities with First Abu Dhabi Bank accounts made more than USD 1.8 bn in outbound payments. The scheme also sold bns of USD in Tether to Russian buyers. FAB told the salmon-colored paper that all A7-linked accounts it identified have been closed and that it applies US, UK, EU, and UN sanctions.

Why a patchwork may be better

A real multilateral system would need rules on FX conversion, liquidity, clearing, final settlement, data sharing, sanctions screening, and dispute resolution, Stibler says. Each requires members to give up sovereignty, “something that at a fundamental DNA level, these are not the group of countries that want to,” he says.

The patchwork also leaves no single target. He argues that a bilateral network is “a lot more durable and flexible as the world changes” than one consolidated system that would “give one clean target” to anyone who wants to go after a parallel financial system. Maynard makes a related point: recent events have made governments everywhere keener to control payment systems that “cannot be switched off or interfered with.”

What to watch

The real test is whether businesses actually use the rails. “You can put the infrastructure together,” Stibler says, but the test is whether “that marginal exporter, that marginal financial actor” moves over. He will be watching whether UAE-India trade beyond easy flows like oil starts settling in local currencies, and whether USD settlement shrinks “towards just what’s required.” That’s hard, he says, because for many traders the cost of the USD system “almost feels like the convenience fee.”

Don’t expect fast results. Stibler expects change to be material over roughly five years and non-linear, with slow gains until a tipping point. In the meantime, he thinks the UAE is doing this “the right way, cautiously.”