QubeHealth-Pay (“QubePay”), the company building the financial infrastructure layer for healthcare in India, has announced its expansion into the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region with the launch of Qube FinTech & AI MENA Limited (“Qube MENA”).
Qube MENA is a newly licensed entity operating out of the Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC), which is home to fintech firms including Stripe and Wise and financial institutions including BlackRock, Goldman Sachs and Nomura. The DIFC entity will serve as Qube’s regional headquarters for the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) and North Africa and marks the company’s first market outside India.
Qube MENA is structured differently from QubePay, the consumer payments and cashback platform operated by Qube in India. In the DIFC, Qube will serve insurers, employers, hospital networks, pharmaceutical companies and other enterprise participants across the region by licensing its technology to address financial problems within the healthcare sector.
Its capabilities include digital healthcare expense processing, claims facilitation and documentation, rule-based bill adjudication support, reconciliation infrastructure, and aggregated, consent-driven healthcare data and insights for insurers, employers and healthcare brands.
The expansion comes as healthcare costs across MENA are rising by an estimated 8–12 per cent annually, outpacing wage growth and, in many markets, government healthcare spending. In the UAE, large categories of care, including IVF and fertility treatment, dental implants, cosmetic and elective procedures, and wellness programmes, remain entirely self-funded despite the country being a relatively well-insured market.
Out-of-pocket healthcare spending is higher elsewhere in the region, particularly across parts of North and East Africa, where insurance penetration remains limited. Insurance companies are seeking solutions to healthcare payment-related challenges, which is a core focus of QubeHealth-Pay.
Qube’s initial regional focus covers four markets: the UAE, Egypt, Kenya and Nigeria, with Dubai serving as its operating and regulatory base. The company will enter each market through an approach suited to its regulatory and insurance landscape, combining partnerships with local insurers, healthcare providers and financial institutions with selective technology-licensing arrangements.
The company plans a phased rollout, beginning with regulatory engagement and partnership-building, followed by pilot deployments and broader enterprise onboarding.
Qube’s India platform, which is live across more than 300 corporates and reaches over 300,000 employee families, will serve as the operating and product base for localisation across MENA’s healthcare systems, insurance structures and regulatory frameworks.
Speaking on the announcement, Chris George, Co-Founder & Group CEO, said, “The out-of-pocket healthcare problem we’ve spent years solving in India isn’t unique to India — it shows up across the Middle East and Africa too, just in different forms. In the UAE, it’s the elective and non-insurable care that falls entirely outside insurance. In markets like Egypt, Kenya and Nigeria, it’s the everyday cost of pharmacy, diagnostics and outpatient care. Setting up in the DIFC gives us a credible, regulated base to build the technology and data infrastructure insurers, employers and healthcare providers across the region need to manage this — the same problem, adapted to how healthcare is actually paid for and insured here.”
Out-of-pocket (OOP) healthcare spending varies across Qube’s target markets. In Dubai, the Dubai Health Authority’s Health Accounts System (HASD) 2022 report put household OOP spending at approximately 10 per cent of current health expenditure. The figure is attributed to mandatory health insurance, although it excludes non-insurable elective categories such as IVF, cosmetic and dental procedures, which are paid for entirely out of pocket and are not captured in official OOP statistics.
Out-of-pocket spending is higher elsewhere in the region, particularly across parts of North and East Africa, where insurance penetration remains limited.
The figures are drawn from company research current as of 2026 and should be independently verified before reuse, as national health-expenditure data is revised periodically.