Banks across the UAE are putting artificial intelligence and digital technology at the heart of everything from payments to customer service. But the deeper the technology becomes embedded, the greater the consequences when it fails, leaving lenders to balance the race to innovate against the need to keep systems running. “In banking, trust is the ultimate currency,” said Pedro Cardoso, group chief digital officer at Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank. “The industry’s responsibility is to ensure that innovation, resilience and customer experience advance together.”
The competitive pressure is real. A new breed of AI-driven, cloud-first lenders has raised the bar on speed, personalisation and cost, and the Dubai International Financial Centre warned in its 2026 Future of Finance report that, without decisive transformation, industry profit pools could fall by 170 billion dollars by 2030, pushing many institutions below their cost of capital. UAE lenders are responding by accelerating technology spending.
Abu Dhabi’s Sharia-compliant Al Hilal Bank has shifted to a “digital-first” model, with more than 95 per cent of its active customers now banking digitally, chief executive Jamal Al Awadhi said, requiring continued investment in infrastructure, cyber security and cloud capabilities. Mid-tier lenders are moving too: National Bank of Fujairah is committing 100 million dirhams a year to become “a digital-first bank with a human touch.” Emirates NBD and First Abu Dhabi Bank, meanwhile, ranked first and third on the Evident AI Index for banks in the Middle East and Africa.
Yet greater dependence on technology raises the stakes when systems go down. Last month, ADCB, the country’s third-largest lender by assets, suffered about a week of intermittent disruption to its mobile app before service returned to normal, though its branches, ATMs and payment operations kept running. The scale illustrates what is at risk: some 1.9 million customers, about 93 per cent of its base, were registered on its mobile and internet platforms at the end of 2025. “As digital banking continues to evolve, resilience is becoming as important as innovation,” said chief information officer Sean Langton, adding that the bank plans to spend hundreds of millions of dollars over the next two to three years.
The challenge is not unique to the UAE. Mastercard has had two disruptions this year, and a glitch in Russia’s interbank networks briefly hit several lenders in April. “No system is failure-proof, so we don’t build as though ours are,” said Sujit Krishnan Unni, group chief technology officer at Network International. Industry executives argue the answer is not to retreat from AI but to make resilience keep pace with it. As IDC’s Inci Kaya put it, strategies are shifting “away from efficiency alone towards continuity, redundancy and risk absorption,” in a market where an outage can dent customer trust and regulatory confidence alike.
