On 02 May 2026, the Bank of Maldives (BML) announced some new measures that will be taken in order to ensure fairer access to foreign currency for public needs.
In their statement, the bank made the following points:
- Under the digital partnership entered between Maldives Immigration, Bank of Maldives will be able to enable foreign spend limits specifically for card-present Point of Sale (POS) transactions conducted overseas. This targeted approach ensures that customers travelling abroad can continue to use their cards seamlessly for genuine transactions, while strengthening safeguards against unauthorized or abusive practices which are against the international card payment networks standards.
- If a student studying abroad does not have their own card and is using a guardian’s card, a student card will be issued to that student with the student foreign spend limit. Until the student card is issued, the guardian’s card can be used for a period of 3 months.
- Few individuals are using the foreign spend limit on personal cards to conduct business transactions on certain online shopping sites. As a result, the Bank is selling large amounts of dollars for such purposes to a limited number of parties. To ensure that the dollars obtained by the Bank are distributed for the benefit of a wider population, a daily budget will be set for the amount sold for such online transactions. However, no changes will be made at this time to sites used for other legitimate personal purposes.
- For e-commerce, fewer than 3% of customers are making more than 30 transactions per month. These are the same parties using the previously mentioned shopping sites for business purposes. Therefore, to ensure fair use of the e-commerce budget, the number of monthly transactions per customer will be limited to 30.
- Cards linked to dollar accounts can be used without any foreign spend restrictions based on the dollars available in the customer's account.
- For customers holding multiple credit cards, annual fee will only be charged for one credit card since the monthly foreign spend limit is applied per customer. No additional annual fee will be charged for customers with multiple credit cards.
- The sale of USD or other foreign currency support for TTs will be processed only during the Bank’s operating hours. However, TT transfers sent in US Dollars can be processed 24/7, including on holidays.
- Parties attempting to obtain large amounts of dollars by splitting TT transactions will be identified, and sales to such parties will be restricted within the imposed limits.
