Scaling a Fintech in MENA? 4 Lessons from Money20/20 Middle East 2026

Riyadh was loud this year. Our Fintech Garden team spent Money20/20 Middle East 2026 recording interviews on the show floor, a few minutes at a time, with people who build the region’s payment rails. You can find keynote recaps anywhere. What you will not find is how these operators answer when the slides are gone. Here are four voices worth your time if you run or build a fintech in MENA: Nasser Saleh, Igor Tomych, Benjamin Fernandes, and Remo Giovanni Abbondandolo.

Money20/20 Middle East is an annual fintech conference held in Riyadh and co-organised with Fintech Saudi. Its 2025 edition reported $4.6 billion in deal announcements, so the hallway conversations carry real weight.

1. Nasser Saleh: a UAE open finance license gives you almost every bank at once

For MadfoatCom, the UAE open finance license works as a distribution shortcut: one connection, and you reach almost all banks in the market.

Nasser Saleh is the Executive Chairman and co-founder of MadfoatCom, the Amman-based company behind eFAWATEERcom, Jordan’s national electronic bill presentment and payment platform. He founded the company in 2011 after years in banking technology, including managing e-channels and e-payments at Al Rajhi Bank in Saudi Arabia.

We know this story from the inside. Our team works with MadfoatCom on its UAE open finance project, so this interview felt like a progress check between partners.

How did a Jordanian bill payment platform become national infrastructure?

MadfoatCom started with one narrow problem: bill payment aggregation. Then the scale arrived.

We started in Jordan for bill payment aggregation, and we became the national electronic platform for the whole country. And we processed more than 40% of the GDP of Jordan.

Forty percent of a country’s GDP. Through one platform.

What does a UAE open finance license unlock?

MadfoatCom is now expanding into Saudi Arabia and the UAE. It recently received initial approval from the Central Bank of the UAE to connect to open finance.

The good thing about the UAE, it’s really already an advanced market. So by connecting to open finance, we are already connected to almost all banks. And then we can introduce our services, which include bill aggregation, aggregation of bank accounts, and other services.

This is where the UAE design matters. The Central Bank published its Open Finance Regulation in the Official Gazette on 15 April 2024. The framework is built around a Trust Framework, a centralised API Hub, and common infrastructural services, so you integrate with the hub once instead of negotiating bank by bank. Data sharing and service initiation are separate license options. If you later want to add an option you did not apply for, the regulation requires a fresh application.

Nasser’s outlook was clear:

We are very optimistic about our expansion efforts in the region.

Pro tip: If you plan to enter the UAE through open finance, map your product to the license scope early. Data sharing and service initiation are separate options under the regulation, and adding one later means a fresh application. After 17+ years shipping regulated products in MENA, the expensive delay is almost always a license that was filed for the wrong option.

Saudi expansion is a different workstream. Integrations that sit with SAMA, SADAD, and ZATCA do not travel from a UAE hub file. See governmental integrations for fintech in KSA.

2. Igor Tomych: open finance is the next layer after open banking

Open banking is becoming standard infrastructure in the Gulf, and the competition has already moved one level up to open finance. That was the thread Igor kept pulling across the show floor, including with Nasser on licensing.

Igor Tomych is the CEO of DashDevs and the founder of Fintech Garden, a London-based fintech media platform and podcast. He has led the launch of more than 25 fintech products in Europe and the US, with a strong focus on MENA, and served as Interim CTO at Tarabut Gateway, one of the region’s open banking pioneers. In March 2026, FinTech Magazine named him one of the Top 10 Fintech Influencers of the year.

Why does open finance matter once open banking is in place?

Igor’s view is simple. Once every bank exposes APIs, access stops being an advantage. What you do with the data becomes the product.

The place is really crowded because a lot of companies are jumping into open finance. It’s a new level after open banking, and open banking becomes a standardized tool for the market. Buy now, pay later players and banks know much more about their customers utilizing those APIs.

That’s the shift. For a longer view of how the region got here, see our guide to open banking in the Middle East.

Why Riyadh, and why now?

For Igor, the Kingdom edition of Money20/20 is where regional decision makers actually show up.

That’s a special place because a lot of stakeholders from the region are visiting, and it’s a great moment to learn what is going on.

His questions also shaped the two conversations below. With Benjamin and Remo, the talk turned to what breaks when you scale.

3. Benjamin Fernandes: you’re only as good as the local APIs

Scaling hundreds of local payment integrations is mostly about reliability engineering around weak bank APIs, and NALA learned that from its own customers.

Benjamin Fernandes is the founder and CEO of NALA, a London-based payments company that runs a consumer money transfer app and Rafiki, a single API for global businesses paying into Africa. NALA raised a $40 million Series A in 2024 to build out its own payment rails.

Igor opened with the numbers. NALA is integrated with roughly 249 banks and 29 mobile money providers. That’s a lot of moving parts.

How do you scale hundreds of local payment integrations?

You rebuild the model for every market. Benjamin was refreshingly direct about how hard that is.

Well, it’s been tough. As we launch a new market, every market has new challenges or new issues that we have to figure out ways to build around. From a regulatory point of view, from a local integration point of view. And then you’re only as good as the local APIs.

Then came the line every payments engineer in the room recognised:

Some banks don’t have great APIs, or maybe they have APIs from 2006. But it’s one of the largest banks of the country. So what do we do?

That is the constraint. The bank you cannot skip is often the one whose interface you would rather skip.

What does automatic rerouting do for reliability?

NALA’s answer is automatic rerouting. When a payout path can’t complete, the system switches to another option in that country without anyone touching it.

Let’s say if there’s not enough [float] in an account, we’ll automatically reroute it to another payment option to pay out into that country. This really helps us massively as a business because it increases our reliability.

And reliability sells. Benjamin said large players such as Western Union and MoneyGram now come to NALA directly:

They see we’re more reliable than others in the market.

That is the same class of problem we see on payment orchestration platforms: routing is the product once volume hits.

Why does a consumer app make B2B infrastructure better?

Igor pushed for the meaty details here, and this answer was the one we kept replaying afterwards. Benjamin admitted he got the market wrong at the start.

If you asked me four or five years ago, would we have imagined doing all these random new integrations? No, I wouldn’t. I would have thought there would be enough reliable space in some markets that you could just build on top of.

What changed his mind was NALA’s own consumer business:

We were servicing consumers who are sending money to these countries, and so when a payment fails, that consumer is very upset with us.

That’s the hidden advantage of running B2C and B2B on the same rails. Your angriest users become your earliest monitoring system.

4. Remo Giovanni Abbondandolo: MENA is a set of very different markets

Global players often treat MENA as one market, and Remo says the region is far more fragmented than that.

Remo Giovanni Abbondandolo is the General Manager for MENA at Checkout.com, the global payments company. He oversees the company’s business strategy and operations in the region and led its UAE acquiring license application and approval.

Why is MENA harder for checkout than it looks?

Igor asked how customer expectations in the Gulf differ from what a European or UK merchant is used to. Remo started with Checkout.com’s track record:

Checkout.com has been focusing on the MENA region for nearly 12 years. I have been attending every single Money20/20 conference so far.

Then he named the mistake he sees most often:

As a global payment company, we do see that very often the MENA region is getting associated to one single place, while in reality it’s way more complex. It’s very fragmented, and you can see there is a massive difference of payment adoption, for example, in Saudi Arabia versus the UAE and the other GCC countries.

The reason sits with consumers:

Not everybody likes to pay with the same payment method, and we know the region is very complex to navigate.

That split is the same one Omar El Gammal laid out on Fintech Garden episode 174: GCC is not one market, and a UAE playbook is not a KSA playbook.

Is one-size-fits-all checkout falling behind?

Igor followed up with the question we think every product team in the region should be asking. Over the last three to five years, BNPL products and wallets have surged. Some wallets now have more customers than the partner bank behind them. So why do companies still ship one checkout for every market?

If your checkout looks the same in Riyadh and Dubai, that question is for you.

What should fintech leaders take from Money20/20 Middle East 2026?

Infrastructure is maturing fast in the Gulf, so your edge now comes from licensing strategy and integration resilience. Local checkout design matters just as much. Here is how the four conversations translate into action.

1. Treat open finance licensing as a distribution channel. Nasser’s case shows that one connection to the UAE API hub can put almost every bank within reach. Plan your product roadmap around what the license lets you initiate and read.
2. Budget for legacy bank APIs from day one. If one of the largest banks in a market runs an API from 2006, you still have to integrate with it. Build fallback and rerouting logic per corridor before you need it. That is fintech integration work, not a later sprint.
3. Use customer pain as your reliability metric. Benjamin’s team learned where rails break because consumers complained first. If you run B2B only, find a way to feel failed payments as quickly as a consumer app does.
4. Design checkout per country. Saudi Arabia and the UAE show very different payment adoption. Your payment method mix and default options should reflect that split.
5. Watch wallets and BNPL as primary customer relationships. Igor’s question to Remo points at a real shift: some wallets now hold more customers than their partner banks. Your integration priorities should follow the users.

Conclusion

The loudest message from Riyadh this year came from operators who are deep in the plumbing. Open finance is opening doors in the UAE. Behind those doors, the hard work is still integrations and local payment habits.

If you’re planning an open finance launch or a multi-market payments integration in MENA, talk to the DashDevs team. We’ve done this before, and we’d love to hear what you’re building. Fintech consulting is the shortest path to a license-and-rails plan that matches the market you are actually entering.