Dubai Electricity and Water Authority (DEWA) said its Smart Bank Guarantee System has reduced transaction turnaround time by 95 percent and reliance on physical bank guarantees by 74 percent. The statement by DEWA managing director and chief executive Saeed Mohammed Al Tayer was reported by the Emirates News Agency (WAM) on 3 October. WAM says the system processes approximately 2,500 bank guarantees a year, with a total value of around AED1 billion. The announcement does not specify the comparison period or the exact turnaround-time measure used to calculate the percentages. The figures are therefore presented as results reported by the authority, rather than an independently measured comparison or a performance rate that can be generalised to other services.

According to the WAM report, the system manages the full guarantee lifecycle through digital workflows, from receipt and review to status updates and follow-up. Paper documents and manual tracking have been replaced by a digital process that supports real-time transaction tracking and data updates. Processing and verification use robotic process automation (RPA), authentication through the SWIFT network and digital audit trails linked to SAP. DEWA says these features support data quality, governance and financial control. RPA means software automation of repetitive tasks; the announcement does not give a separate measure of how many staff hours or roles have been affected. It also does not provide a breakdown of the 2,500 guarantees by type, value band, beneficiary or processing channel, so the annual volume should be read as an overall approximate figure.

The announcement follows earlier digitisation work on the same process. In 2020, DEWA said it had made bank guarantee management fully paperless with Emirates NBD and cut completion time by 80 percent compared with the conventional method. The new 95 percent turnaround-time and 74 percent physical-guarantee figures are claims in the 2026 announcement; the published report does not say that they use the same baseline or measurement method as the 2020 comparison. WAM also reports that the system received a five-star rating at the International Best Practice Competition, but provides neither the competition’s criteria nor a link between that rating and the operational percentages. Al Tayer said DEWA is developing an integrated operating model using artificial intelligence, but no launch date or detailed scope was stated. The reported announcement is focused on the digitisation of a financial administration process and the efficiency results attributed to that system by the authority.