UAE's Ziina Becomes Payment Provider of Choice for Meydan Free Zone Businesses

UAE payments fintech Ziina has partnered with Dubai's Meydan Free Zone to become the payment provider of choice for the zone's member businesses, giving newly licensed companies access to instant, hardware-free payment acceptance.

Under the partnership, Meydan Free Zone business owners can use Ziina to accept money through Tap to Pay, QR codes or custom payment links, without dedicated point-of-sale hardware. Every Meydan Free Zone licence holder also unlocks an incentive of 10,000 dirhams in fee-free processing, aimed at strengthening cash flow for founders as they launch.

The tie-up connects two parts of the startup journey: Meydan Free Zone issues its Fawri licence in under an hour, giving founders a company structure and full ownership, while Ziina layers on the ability to start collecting payments immediately. Together, the companies pitched the combination as a way for entrepreneurs to set up and begin transacting in Dubai quickly.

For Ziina, embedding its acceptance tools into a major free zone's onboarding provides a distribution channel to reach new small and medium-sized businesses at the moment they incorporate. The company has been expanding its merchant offering, adding Tap to Pay and multi-channel acceptance as it competes to become the default payments layer for Gulf SMEs.

The partnership is part of a wider trend in the UAE, where free zones increasingly bundle banking, payments and business-services partnerships to attract founders and differentiate their licensing packages in a competitive market for company formation.