Mashreq wins at Asian Banking & Finance Retail Banking Awards 2025

The company took home the Open Banking Initiative of the Year - UAE with its digital account opening for non-resident Egyptians.

Mashreq was recognised at the Asian Banking & Finance Retail Banking Awards 2025 for its groundbreaking move for cross-border banking, the launch of a fully digital account opening journey for Non-Resident Egyptians (NREs).

This initiative enables Egyptian nationals living in the UAE to open a Mashreq Egypt account in less than 10 minutes, marking a significant shift from traditional processes. With this, the bank and the customers go away with the previous process that typically took up to 30 days and involved extensive paperwork and physical visits. The new solution simplifies this into an instant digital experience directly within the Mashreq Mobile App.

As the UAE houses a large Egyptian expat population, Mashreq identified a major customer pain point: opening and managing bank accounts back home. The bank worked for a solution and introduced an API-integrated journey between Mashreq UAE and Mashreq Egypt, eliminating the complexity and delay of manual processes.

This new approach allows customers to open a Mashreq Egypt account digitally, from the UAE, get instant activation, ready to use in under 10 minutes, send money home instantly and with real-time beneficiary set-up, and view real-time balance and account status within the Mashreq App.

This initiative achieves multiple industry firsts, namely first frictionless digital banking synergy between two banks across borders, first digital KYC for NRE accounts, first real-time account activation and balance tracking, first full integration within a single mobile app, and first scalable cross-country onboarding experience.

Moreover, the digital journey empowers customers with the time saved in the new process, real-time visibility, no paperwork approach, end-to-end convenience, and instant remittance.

Customers are also guided at every step, with the ability to pause, re-attempt, and complete the journey at their own pace, without ever needing to call or visit a branch.

The bank has achieved several tangible operational benefits with this solution. Amongst these are the automated onboarding, which involves high volume capability with reduced manual work; faster processing with digitally submitted documents and real-time validation; instant activation that eliminates waiting periods for account use; and robust compliance.

The journey is fully scalable, hence Mashreq is able to extend this model to other expat communities and partner banks in other regions.

Mashreq is now laying the foundation for a global Open Banking platform that allows Non-Residents in any part of the world to digitally open and manage accounts in their home country. This unified solution aims to revolutionise NRE banking by making cross-border finance simple, secure, and truly global.

Asian Banking & Finance Retail Banking Awards recognises the outstanding entities in the retail banking landscape, and serves as a platform to highlight their innovative solutions, retail products, digital banking breakthroughs, and exceptional customer experiences.

The ABF Retail Banking Awards is presented by Asian Banking & Finance Magazine. To view the full list of winners, click here. If you want to join the 2026 awards programme and be recognised for your company's cutting-edge products, services, and solutions that made a positive impact on your customers, please contact Julie Anne Nuñez-Difuntorum at [email protected].