Saudi Arabia moved from sandbox to full commercial open banking licensing earlier this year. The UAE built an entire national open finance hub in 12 months. The infrastructure actually exists. The question now is whether banks know what to do with it. Joining me is Chris Michael, Co-Founder and CEO of Ozone API, the company that helped build the UK’s open banking standard and is now shaping the same framework across MENA. Chris, welcome to the show. You helped write the UK’s open finance standard — looking at what MENA is building now, how does it compare?
A number of markets in MENA are taking the UK model and standard that we developed and iterating on it and improving it — firstly Bahrain, then Saudi Arabia, and most recently the UAE. In every case there has been an opportunity to look at what was implemented in the UK and improve on it. The biggest innovation is continual improvement across MENA.
The UAE built a national open finance API hub in 12 months. Is that speed an advantage?
I think it is an advantage if you do it in the right way. The technology is based on our infrastructure — proven infrastructure. What is changing very quickly is that the standards are evolving to open more and more use cases. It is moving fast and it is pretty exciting. I think it is a benefit to move fast.
Why does open banking still feel fragmented for the average person?
Open banking is not really a term or concept that the average user needs to worry about. ANBI have actually taken a smart decision to rebrand it with a customer-facing brand name — Al Tarek. The name open banking itself is not a particularly good name. What is important is the services built on top of it. It has been live now for a number of months but fintechs are still just building their services on top of the platform. When those services start to operate at scale across the UAE, that is when you will start to see the real value unlocked for customers.
You launched a guide on commercialising open banking. What is the single biggest revenue opportunity banks are not fully capturing yet?
I think it takes a while to get the benefit. But the biggest use case is lending — in terms of value to banks. Banks can offer loans through open banking. You already have credit reference agencies and credit scores. But open banking gives the lender a much better view of the customer’s affordability — their income, their expenditure — and it is much more real time. It can help reduce the cost of lending, help banks offer loans with less risk, and therefore give individuals, businesses, and the whole economy better access to credit.
You have argued that digital assets and open finance still do not talk to each other. Why does that gap matter?
What we have seen around the world is an evolution from open banking to open finance — opening up access to accounts that are not just bank accounts: investments, savings, insurance. And what is important is not just reading the data, but initiating services — opening an account, moving money, making a payment. The reason it is important for this to extend to digital assets is that increasingly more people are holding their money in digital assets. The next generation of humans on the planet will probably be holding more money in digital assets than conventional vehicles. So it is really important that the concept of open banking and open finance extends to cover digital assets as well.
Saudi Arabia has moved to full commercial open banking licensing. What is actually changing on the ground?
The biggest change is that the open banking framework is moving from just reading data and getting access to accounts — it is now moving to cover payment initiation. The standards were published a while ago. But now that firms are starting to get licensed for real, we are going to start to see payment initiation becoming a real thing in Saudi Arabia. It is a big market — millions of customers, millions of bank accounts. Payment initiation offers a real opportunity for fintechs and for customers to get better financial outcomes and better experiences.
What is the next big challenge for the space?
The biggest thing that is starting to happen and will impact this whole space is agentic commerce. Agents sitting on top of people’s bank accounts — either giving them advice based on their financial position or even making payments on their behalf. That is both an opportunity and a challenge. As soon as you have that, it is difficult to know where a customer’s data actually sits. That is maybe the bigger challenge ahead.
Thank you so much for being here with us today.
Thank you.
