I generally agree with your statement about UAE banks, I bank with the top 3 mentioned ENBD, FAB and ADCB and there is definitely one bank that stands out - ADCB, both on personal and corporate levels. On a corporate level they can give you access to their spot FX trading facility, so you can get close to mid market rates - margins obviously depends on the volume, but they do have such platform in place. Also on a personal level ADCB is great to deal with. Excellency personal account FX rates are the best on the market on the premium banking segment (FAB Elite doesn't even offer any better FX rates online compared to non Elite accounts). Their credit cards also stand out, Traveller card with 0% FX fees + 20% hotels & flights discount (the latter capped at AED 5000 but still good, I book business class AED 5000 cheaper). Hotels discounts are unlimited, so this card has saved me a LOT of money in expensive locations & hotels. The only issue is the hotel has to be available on hotels.com and it has to be possible to prepay for it. They were the only local bank which had offshore Jersey location with multi currency accounts with debit cards (EUR/USD/GBP) integrated under one login with instant and free transfers between onshore and offshore and served by the same relationship manager. I know they closed Jersey accounts but still, they did stand out with this solutions as a local bank.
I had a fraudulent transaction on my cc lately and they have credited the amount 48 hours from receiving my complaint form, where all other banks normally ask you to wait 3 months until the investigation is completed. They gave me 100k
credit card limit without any questions asked or security cheques required - as an Excellency customer from "day 1" I started banking with them. Try that with FAB, even after being Elite for many years, they will ask for tons of documents and security cheques to be signed. They (ADCB) do rely on SMS OTP, however all new beneficiaries require confirmation. So ADCB will call you within 24-48 hours (usually it is just few hours) to confirm the beneficiary, without that you cannot transfer money out. It is a bit of an inconvenience, as I don't know any other
UAE bank doing that but on the other hand, it gives me a great peace of mind.
We don't know the true story behind
TW problems. If that would be the case, they would not be granted ADGM's license. I mean the government knew what TW is about. Also TW is not really a great option for users having AED, as their deposits were automatically converted to USD + TW fees for sending payments are high in my opinion. The only good thing about TW was EU IBAN for freezone company free of charge. I would never use TW on a personal level to exchange FX, as it works out for me much cheaper elsewhere.
