A Syrian entrepreneur who built his career in Dubai's e-commerce boom is betting that the same playbook of bundled services, one-tap payments and cashless transactions can help jump-start a market that international card networks abandoned for 14 years.
“There are many successful examples in the UAE that help both locals and visitors,” said Rami Kaiem, co-founder of My Syria, a “super app” that lets visitors and residents book hotels, cars and tourist experiences and pay with Visa, Mastercard or Amex. “We are trying to repeat the success story we learnt from over the past 20 years in the UAE and apply it here in our country, Syria.”
Mr Kaiem built the platform alongside co-founders Feras Kaiem, Waseem Qudmani and Kinan Madi through 121 Living, a UAE-based venture, after two decades working in the emirate's technology and logistics sector.
The idea for My Syria was inspired by #MyDubai, a Dubai government-backed campaign promoting the city as a global destination, Mr Kaiem told The National in an interview.
“As the owners of My Syria, we all hope to contribute to developing our country for the better and to apply here what we have learned from our experience in the UAE.”
My Syria, which launched in Damascus earlier this month, is the first platform in Syria to process cross-border digital payments, a workaround in a country where Visa and Mastercard have only just begun re-establishing formal networks after being frozen out since 2011. The app signed up 12,000 active users in its first 15 days, Mr Kaiem said.
“Anyone can now pay via Visa or Mastercard through our application. This is possible because our UAE-based company is able to receive the payments,” he said.
“Dubai is very advanced when it comes to technology, e-commerce, infrastructure and logistics. We learnt a lot from the government, from the people and from the infrastructure there. That gave us a lot of experience in how to build a successful e-commerce business.”
The Dubai experience is now being applied to a Syrian market where digital banking infrastructure is still nascent.
The founders have promised Syria's Minister of Communications they will resolve the remaining gaps in international online payments within six months, Mr Kaiem said.
Growing UAE ties
Syria's economy is emerging from more than a decade of sanctions that cut it off from the global financial system, and Gulf capital is moving in fast to fill the vacuum. On Monday, the US removed Syria from its list of state sponsors of terrorism, paving the way for international banking institutions and capital to re-enter the country.
The UAE and Syria held their first bilateral business forum since the fall of Bashar Al Assad in May, when UAE Minister of Foreign Trade Dr Thani Al Zeyoudi led a delegation of officials and businessmen to Damascus.
Gulf investors poured $28 billion into the Syrian economy in 2025. UAE logistics operator DP World has committed $800 million to a 30-year concession to run the port of Tartous on Syria's western Mediterranean coast. The World Bank puts Syria's reconstruction bill at $216 billion, which is roughly 10 times the country's 2024 gross domestic product.
International payment companies are slowly making their way back. Mastercard signed a memorandum of understanding with the Central Bank of Syria in September 2025, the first agreement of its scale with the Syrian regulator since sanctions took hold. In January, the regulator licensed Qatar National Bank to resume card operations in the country.
However, Syrian banks still carry more than $1.6 billion in exposure to Lebanon's financial crisis and have not been required to modernise compliance systems in more than a decade.
My Syria is positioning itself to bridge that gap in the meantime, drawing directly on the model Mr Kaiem watched take shape in Dubai.
The app currently offers eight services, including car rental, hotel bookings and holiday-home rentals, concentrated in Damascus, with plans to expand to roughly 40 services and eventually cover the whole country.
Syria's Ministry of Tourism says visitor arrivals more than doubled in the first half of 2026, to 3.52 million from 1.67 million a year earlier, as the country reopens to travellers after Mr Assad's fall.
“The journey with My Syria has just started,” Mr Kaiem said. “We have a lot of work to do.”
For now, much of Syria's economy, and its tourism sector in particular, still runs offline and on cash, a legacy of sanctions.
My Syria's founders are wagering that closing that gap, transaction by transaction, can make the app a digital front door for a country trying to convince Gulf money and foreign visitors that it is open for business.
