GCC Is Not One Market, with Omar El Gammal | Fintech Garden Podcast 174

Omar El Gammal, EVP of Global Business Development at Paymob, opens by rejecting the umbrella term most founders use. In his framing, treating the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Oman, and the rest of the Gulf as one market is the first strategic mistake: different dialects, different population composition, different regulatory frameworks, and different national visions all mean a strategy built for one rarely transfers cleanly to another.

UAE vs. Saudi Arabia: two fundamentally different plays

Omar draws a sharp contrast between the two largest markets. The UAE’s diverse, international population rewards a hiring strategy built around matching merchant nationalities and languages. Saudi Arabia is more locally concentrated and nationalistic in its business culture, and typically requires more funding given its regulatory scale. Neither market rewards a copy-paste strategy from the other.

That is why fintech integrations in KSA and a UAE playbook are not interchangeable workstreams. They are two go-to-market designs.

The licensing playbook: skip the consultant, go get first-hand knowledge

Omar’s clearest piece of advice for founders: don’t put a consultant between yourself and the market. His alternative is to run interviews with potential local hires, which doubles as both recruiting and direct market intelligence, and to build a compliant MVP (like a PSP business under a bank sponsorship) that generates real regulatory understanding before committing a full year to building a licensing file “completely detached from reality.”

Teams navigating that path often start with fintech consulting that maps license, sponsorship, and product scope before the file is written.

Regulators are allies, not obstacles

Omar pushes back on treating licensing as a bureaucratic barrier. Paymob’s central bank partners directly steered them toward digitizing rent payments and education payments, two use cases that now contribute meaningfully to revenue. His broader point: regulators see market patterns founders can’t, and aligning with their goals accelerates both licensing and market growth.

What’s next: open finance, crypto, and pay-by-bank

Looking 18 to 24 months out, Omar flags open finance, crypto and payment tokens, and pay-by-bank (especially for B2B use cases) as the areas founders should be positioning for now, alongside continued regulatory tightening around BNPL as adoption scales across the region.

For a regional view of that shift, see open banking in the Middle East.