Sarwa Review UAE 2026

Sarwa Trade is offered in the UAE by Sarwa Digital Wealth (Capital) Limited, licensed by the FSRA in Abu Dhabi Global Market under FSP 190037.

What the register confirms. Three activities: Managing Assets, Advising, and Arranging Deals. It does not list Dealing in Investments or Providing Custody. Sarwa's account-approval email says it also holds a Category 3C licence with endorsements to hold client money. ADGM doesn't publish endorsements, so we couldn't check that on the register (20 August 2026). Sarwa repeats the claim consistently, but it is still Sarwa's claim.

Where your shares sit. With Alpaca Securities LLC in the United States, which executes and holds Sarwa Trade positions. SIPC covers up to $500,000, including $250,000 in cash, if Alpaca fails; it doesn't cover market losses. There is no UAE compensation scheme, for Sarwa or any other broker on this site.

Cash. An optional FDIC sweep can move uninvested dollars into insured US banks, up to $1,000,000. It's a US scheme for cash, and it was off by default on our account.

Regulatory record. The FSRA has penalised Sarwa four times since 2022. Three were for tax-reporting failures under CRS and FATCA, including 137 accounts reported with inaccurate tax numbers (January 2024). The fourth, on 21 May 2024, was a USD 122,500 fine for offering shares in its own parent company without an approved prospectus.

The same day, the DFSA fined the group's DIFC company USD 191,100 over the same offer, which had reached about 100,000 users. That DIFC licence was withdrawn on 14 June 2024, and only the ADGM company takes clients now.

Safety signals

Opening is fully online, but it's a long questionnaire, not a quick form. Expect questions on income and its source, net worth, employment, citizenship, tax residency and your UAE visa status.

Then comes ID verification through Onfido (the desktop-to-phone handoff expires after an hour) and proof of address. At the end you accept the client agreement, an Alpaca crypto agreement and a W-8BEN.

Use UAE PASS if you have it. It's offered on the first screen, confirms residency instantly and skips the proof-of-address upload.

Our account was ready to fund 36 minutes after we submitted the application, well inside the app's own estimate of a few minutes to two business days.

Deposit. We sent 200 AED from a UAE bank through Sarwa's open banking rail, run by Lean Technologies. It arrived in five seconds, against the app's estimate of five minutes to a day.

It became $54.31, an implied rate of about 3.68 against the 3.6725 peg: roughly 0.27%, with no fee line shown. Lean's consent screen says it operates in the UAE under an in-principle approval from the Central Bank, as a pilot.

The bank rail is free. Express "Instant Funding" costs 0.99% (capped at AED 2,000 on our account, scaled to account size), and card fees aren't shown until you add a card.

Withdrawal. Free, but with some friction. You must give a reason, and choosing "Portfolio performance" brought up a screen arguing against leaving.

We asked for the full $52.32 on Saturday 29 August. It reached our bank on Monday 31 August, about 46 hours later and inside Sarwa's 1 to 2 business day window, as 191.70 AED from Sarwa's account at Emirates NBD. That's about 0.23% below the peg, with no withdrawal fee.

The round trip. 200 AED in, 191.70 AED back. Of the 8.30 AED lost, about 7.29 AED was the test trade (mostly the $1 fee each way), about 1 AED was conversion, and nothing went on bank or withdrawal fees. That's one data point each way, not a guaranteed rate.

Funding methods

Tested: US-listed stocks and ETFs. We bought and sold Vanguard's S&P 500 ETF (VOO).

Available, not tested:

Options. Behind a seven-step eligibility application and limited to four strategies: buying calls and puts, selling covered calls, selling cash-secured puts, and exercising. The $4-per-contract price comes after that.

Crypto. On 23 September the funded account reached a live Bitcoin ticket at $87,468.13, buyable from $10 in fractional units, and the web dashboard lists eight coins. Crypto trades with Alpaca Crypto LLC, a separate company. We placed no order.

IPO access (there was no live offering to test) and an opt-in securities lending programme run by Alpaca.

Sarwa Invest (managed portfolios) and Sarwa Save (cash, advertising up to 3.7% in the app) are separate products we didn't fund.

Stocks and ETFs. Our $25 VOO buy cost a flat $1.00 fee, shown on the ticket before we confirmed: $26.00 in total. The sale 11 minutes later cost the same, so the round trip lost $1.99, almost all of it fees.

That $1 is about 4% of a $25 trade. Sarwa's schedule charges $1 or 0.25% of the trade, whichever is greater, so the percentage only takes over on orders above $400. We haven't tested an order that size yet.

Sarwa Invest (not tested) charges an annual management fee from 0.85% under $100,000 down to 0.4% at $5,000,000 and above, with a $7 monthly minimum at the entry tier.

We placed every trade on the web, even though Sarwa is often described as app-only. The order menu has five types: buy in shares, buy in dollars, recurring Auto Trade, limit and stop, with fractional orders from $1.

The order ticket is the best part. It shows the estimated price, shares, buying power, the exact fee and the total cost before you confirm, not after.

The iOS app (version 8.0.2) matched the web account to the cent a day after funding, and switches between English and Arabic.

Security is basic. There are toggles for Face or Touch ID and two-factor login, but two-factor was off on the web and on in the app for the same account, so check both. An emailed code, valid for five minutes, was required at every login from 27 August. There's no device list, no login alerts and no withdrawal whitelist.

The home screen pushes Sarwa Invest and Sarwa Save, and advertises a "Black Swan Protection" fund designed with Nassim Taleb. Sarwa's pricing page marks it as coming soon, so we couldn't test it.

This is where Sarwa is most clearly built for the UAE.

UAE PASS on the first screen verifies residency instantly and skips the proof-of-address upload.

Dirhams both ways. Our AED deposit landed in five seconds, and our withdrawal came back in dirhams from Sarwa's account at Emirates NBD, about 46 hours after a Saturday request.

A Shariah filter, not an Islamic account. Sarwa's Shariah Compliance feature is an opt-in badge on individual holdings, not a swap-free account. Sarwa says it doesn't hold an FSRA Islamic Window endorsement.

As with every broker on this site, there's no UAE compensation scheme.

A Help Center and a WhatsApp contact channel are both listed inside the app.

The help centre is organised by product rather than by problem: nine categories covering Invest, Trade, Save, Options Trading, Crypto, pricing, deposits and withdrawals, account and security, and Black Swan Protection. Articles carry visible dates, which is more than most brokers manage, and the most recent we saw were from September 2026. Written contact runs through a ticket form asking for your email, the platform, an inquiry category, a subject and a description, with attachments allowed. Sarwa publishes hello@sarwa.co and a WhatsApp number alongside it.

What Sarwa does not publish is a target. The form promises a reply "as soon as possible" and no stated turnaround appears anywhere on the page, where Interactive Brokers commits to 48 hours and XTB to 30 days on a formal complaint. We did not message either channel, so support stays unscored here rather than guessed at.

Learn appears as its own section in the app menu, and a SARWA 101 video is referenced repeatedly across onboarding and the Home screen. We did not open and evaluate the depth of that content in this pass, so research and education is left unscored rather than guessed at.

• 4 May 2026

  First UAE-founded fintech to pass $1 billion in client assets

  Sarwa said it had crossed $1 billion in client assets. By its own definition the figure covers holdings and cash across Invest, Trade, Crypto and Save at fair value, and it is a measure of scale, not protection: Sarwa Trade holdings are still custodied at Alpaca Securities in the United States, as our review sets out.

  DIFC news