Podcast 160:What MENA gets right about open finance, with Samer Soliman

For most operators outside the region, MENA’s open banking story is not the one being covered in the European trade press.

It should be.

The UAE has issued Open Finance Licenses. Bahrain has been operating an open banking framework regulated by the Central Bank of Bahrain for several years. And the model — regulator-driven, deliberately scoped, designed for the broader open finance perimeter from day one — is producing results that look meaningfully different from the European and UK experience.

In this episode of the Fintech Garden Podcast, host Igor Tomych sits down with Samer Soliman, Group CEO of Arab Financial Services. AFS is owned by 37 banks and financial institutions, serves more than 70 clients across over 20 countries, and operates at the centre of MENA’s payments and fintech infrastructure.

The conversation is what fintech needs more of: less theory, more operator perspective from someone who has built the platforms being discussed.

The MENA Bet Is Regulator-Driven — Intentionally

A persistent question in every open banking jurisdiction is whether the market or the regulator should lead.

Samer’s answer, grounded in twenty-plus years of operating across the region, is direct.

The regulator drives. The market follows.

In Bahrain and the UAE, the regulators have nurtured open finance into existence — designing the frameworks, granting the licenses, setting the deadlines, and pushing the ecosystem onto the new rails.

The alternative — waiting for market-led adoption — has been tried in other geographies and has not produced comparable outcomes.

Samer’s logic is structural. Incumbent banks accumulated their customer data over decades. Asking them to voluntarily share it with competitors is asking them to dismantle their own moat.

That is not a strategy. It is a wish.

What the regulator-driven model produces, when it is well-designed, is a level competitive surface. Every regulated player has to expose the same APIs, share the same scope of data, meet the same deadline. Once the framework is live, competition shifts from “who has the data” to “who delivers the best experience on top of it.”

Open Finance Is Broader Than Open Banking — Scope Matters

European operators tend to use “open banking” as the dominant frame. MENA has skipped that step and gone directly to open finance.

The difference is the perimeter.

Open banking covers banking transactions and payment initiation.

Open finance extends to insurance, wealth, and other regulated financial services.

This sounds like a small distinction. It is not.

When the perimeter is broader from the beginning, the network effects compound faster. Insurance premium personalisation, credit-scoring-on-demand, and account-aggregation-for-onboarding can all appear as concurrent use cases rather than sequential ones.

For European fintech operators watching what comes next, this is one of the clearest signals.

The next wave of open banking regulation in Europe is moving toward open finance scope. MENA is already operating there.

Three Near-Term Use Cases Where the Value Is Real

Samer is direct about where open finance produces commercial value in the next 24 to 36 months.

One: Payment initiation. Moving money from one bank account to another without intermediary cards or networks. The simplest possible application. The unit economics work.

Two: Credit scoring. Particularly for Buy Now Pay Later operators. With open finance data, the customer can know in advance whether a loan will be approved and at what limit, before submitting any application. The credit-bureau lag disappears. The user experience improves materially.

Three: Financial planning. Including deposit facilitation and goal-driven savings products that can read directly from a customer’s broader financial picture. This is the layer where personalisation begins to compound.

“Sky’s the limit,” Samer notes. But these three are where the unit economics already make sense.

Customer Ownership Is Up for Grabs

This is the most consequential strategic insight in the conversation.

Open finance dissolves the historical claim banks had on customer ownership.

Until now, customer data sat inside a single institution and that institution effectively owned the relationship. The customer could leave, but the data did not travel with them.

With consent-based data portability, that changes.

No one owns the customer by default.

Whoever delivers the best experience and the highest value-to-cost ratio wins them — for as long as they continue to deliver it.

The competitive equation shifts.

From: “We hold your data, you stay with us.” To: “We earn your continued use of our front end every quarter.”

Banks that built their strategy on data lock-in have a structural problem. Operators that built their strategy on customer experience have a structural advantage.

The latter group is much smaller than the marketing decks suggest.

The Unsexy Truth About Open Banking Data

This is the section operators in every market should sit with.

Open banking, in most implementations to date, produces data that is broadly unusable for the sophisticated decisioning vendors are marketing.

Samer’s illustration is precise.

You walk into a supermarket. You buy electronics. You buy medicine. You buy clothing. You buy groceries. You pay one consolidated bill.

The bank sees one transaction.

The supermarket knows what you actually bought.

The supermarket does not share line-item data with the bank.

The result is that open finance, as currently implemented, reasons over data too coarse to support most of the high-value use cases.

Until item-level data flows alongside transaction data — which requires merchant cooperation, not just bank cooperation — the AI layer sitting on top of open banking will reason poorly.

Garbage in, garbage out.

The implication for product teams is direct.

Stop building open-banking-powered features that assume you know what the customer is buying. Start building open-banking-powered features that assume you know broad spending patterns and adjacent context, and use AI to infer the rest carefully.

The vendors that can solve the item-level data flow problem will own the next phase of this category.

Whoever Knows the Data First Wins

A pattern Samer draws from outside financial services and applies inward.

Google dominates internet behaviour. Apple dominates the hardware-plus-internet stack. Elon Musk’s Starlink went one level deeper — by owning satellite internet, it sits underneath whatever happens on top, including Google.

The same logic applies to financial services.

The institutions that win the next decade are not necessarily the ones with the most data.

They are the ones who get the relevant data earliest in the decision cycle, before everyone else.

This reframes the open finance strategy.

The question is not “do we have a data lake?”

The question is “are we positioned at the point in the customer journey where the decision is being made — and do we see the signal before our competitors do?”

This is a different roadmap than most fintechs are building toward.

AI + Open Finance — Boom (With Caveats)

Asked directly whether AI in payments is hype or substance, Samer is clear.

The combination is genuinely transformative.

“Boom,” in his exact words.

Open finance provides the data pipeline. AI provides the speed and pattern recognition. Together, they enable financial decision-making at a scale and tempo that neither technology can produce alone.

The caveat operators tend to skip is governance.

Both AI and open finance are governed environments. There is a regulatory layer around how data can be used, how consent is captured, how decisions can be explained, and how outcomes are audited.

The combination unlocks enormous capability. The governance determines which capabilities can actually be deployed.

For product teams, this means two roadmaps run in parallel: the technical capability roadmap and the governance-and-explainability roadmap that determines what can ship.

The companies that recognise both as first-class concerns will move faster than those that treat compliance as a downstream check.

Prepare for Winter During Summer

This is one of Igor’s reframes that landed cleanly in the conversation and that Samer endorses with operational detail.

AFS, despite running an open finance platform, does not currently make material money from it.

The investment is a hedge.

A hedge against the structural shift Samer expects within the decade: when customer behaviour moves toward open-finance-mediated decisions, AFS is positioned to participate in that flow rather than be displaced by it.

The strategic principle is to build the capability during the quiet period, so it is ready when the market accelerates.

The reference points are concrete.

Digital banking adoption sat at 30 to 40% of customers for years. Then COVID pushed it to majority adoption in months.

E-commerce in the region had been growing slowly for a decade. Then COVID produced the hockey stick.

Open finance, in Samer’s view, is in the “summer” phase now. Real adoption will arrive when an external forcing function — regulatory, economic, generational — moves it.

The fintech operators who built during the slow period will be the ones positioned when the curve bends.

The ones who wait will be late and expensive.

Don’t Rebuild What Already Exists

Samer’s closing advice to fintech founders is operationally specific.

Technology will continue to evolve. The question is not whether to adopt, but how to adopt without overbuilding.

The recommendation is direct.

Do not rebuild infrastructure that already exists in the ecosystem.

Use what is available — payment platforms, identity layers, KYC providers, open finance hubs.

Concentrate the build effort on the front end, where the customer relationship actually lives.

Customer loyalty attaches to the interface. Not to the back-end.

The fintech operators winning the next decade will be the ones who recognise that the moat is at the user-facing surface, not in reinventing the rails underneath.

For founders building in the open finance space, this is the most actionable framing in the conversation.

Build what differentiates. Buy what does not. And do both during summer, so the platform is ready when winter arrives.