Nine out of ten operating companies in the United Arab Emirates are small or medium-sized enterprises, and together they generate more than 60 percent of the country's non-oil GDP. Yet those same businesses receive only about 10 percent of total bank funding, a mismatch that has quietly dictated how UAE entrepreneurs manage cash flow for years.

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This week, Dubai-based spend management platform Pemo took a step toward narrowing that gap, confirming it has received in-principle approval from the Central Bank of the UAE for a Stored Value Facility license, regulatory clearance that will eventually let the company hold and move customer funds through its own infrastructure rather than routing every transaction through a partner bank.

What a Stored Value Facility License Actually Changes

A Stored Value Facility, or SVF, is the Central Bank of the UAE's regulatory category for companies permitted to hold customer money in digital wallet style accounts. It sits below a full banking license but above a simple payments permit, and it is the mechanism that lets a fintech load, hold and move funds without a traditional bank account sitting in the middle of every transaction. For Pemo, the distinction matters less as a compliance milestone than as an operational one. Once the license process concludes, which the company expects to finish within months, money loaded into its platform will move and settle faster, and Pemo itself, rather than a third-party bank partner, becomes the regulated entity responsible for safeguarding customer funds under Central Bank rules.

The Ten Percent Problem

The statistic buried inside the announcement, that SMEs make up roughly 90 percent of UAE operating companies but capture only about 10 percent of bank funding, describes a structural condition that shows up less in headline economic data than in the daily experience of running a small business. It is rarely a revenue problem. It is a timing problem: money a business is owed and money a business needs to spend seldom arrive on the same schedule, and traditional banking rails, built around batch transfers and multi-day settlement windows, were never designed to smooth that gap for companies too small to warrant the dedicated treasury relationships larger corporates receive.

That mismatch is what keeps small business owners preoccupied with cash flow even when the underlying business is healthy. An SVF license does not solve access to credit, which remains a separate and harder problem, but it addresses the plumbing beneath it, letting funds held on a licensed platform's own rails move without waiting on the transfer windows of an intermediary bank.

From Corporate Cards to a Deposit-Style Product

Pemo has grown quickly since launching in 2022, expanding to serve more than 6,000 businesses across the UAE, a customer base that spans fast-growing SMEs alongside established names such as Talabat, Sodexo and Al Marwan Group Holding. Its existing product, a mix of corporate cards, automated expense tracking and accounting integrations, has positioned the company as a spend management layer sitting on top of businesses' existing bank accounts. The SVF approval marks its first step toward becoming something closer to a deposit-holding financial services provider in its own right, with digital wallets and expanded fund-holding capabilities planned as the license process concludes.

Ayham Gorani, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Pemo, framed the milestone around the trust the company has built with its existing customer base. “This in-principal approval reflects the trust our customers place in us every day. We are deeply grateful to the Central Bank of the UAE for its guidance throughout this process, to our team for the work that made it possible, and to our customers for the trust they place in us every day. From day one, Pemo has been built for SMEs here. This milestone means we can keep deepening that support while opening the door to new products that go beyond spend management and make managing business finances even simpler.”

A Foundation, Not a Finish Line

Nothing changes immediately for Pemo's existing customers, who continue to operate on the safeguarded infrastructure the company already uses through licensed partners. What the in-principle approval signals is closer to a regulatory foundation being poured under a platform already in daily use, one the company says will support new products in the months ahead. Pemo has indicated the SVF news is the first of several announcements it expects to make in the coming weeks as it expands partnerships across the UAE's SME finance landscape.

It also places Pemo inside a wider pattern taking shape across the UAE's financial technology sector, where regulators have increasingly used licensing categories like the SVF to let consumer and business-facing platforms take on more of the plumbing that used to sit exclusively with banks. That shift has already reshaped the market for individual consumers through digital wallet and card programs; Pemo's approval extends the same logic to the business side of the ledger, where the case for faster, more direct access to funds is arguably even stronger, since a delayed transfer for an SME is not an inconvenience but a working capital constraint that can determine whether payroll, supplier invoices or rent gets paid on time.

The approval arrives as the Central Bank of the UAE continues building out a regulatory framework, alongside broader efforts around digital transformation and financial inclusion, meant to give companies like Pemo a clear path from spend management tool to full financial services provider. For a sector that produces the majority of the UAE's non-oil economic activity while receiving a fraction of its bank funding, a faster and more direct route to holding and moving business cash is a modest fix. It is also, for the SMEs waiting on it, a foundational one, and a signal that the country's push toward a fully digital, more inclusive financial system is being built as much around the needs of its smallest companies as its largest.

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