Host: With us in the studio is Nihal Abu Ghattas, Co-Chair of the MFT Open Finance Working Group, joining us to discuss the different approaches being taken by the region's two largest economies. Nihal, welcome to Capital Markets, FinTech TV.
Nihal Abu Ghattas: Thank you for having me.
Host: First — what is open finance, and why should someone who just uses their banking app care about it?
Nihal Abu Ghattas: Open finance is fundamentally about giving control back to the consumer. Today, banking operates in silos — Bank A has no visibility into what happens at Bank B. Open finance changes that by allowing customers to share their data with authorised third-party providers, so they can access better deals: faster loans, better mortgage rates, better insurance premiums. It puts the power back in the hands of the end consumer.
Host: The UAE's open finance implementation is already 85% complete. What has actually been built so far?
Nihal Abu Ghattas: When we talk about 85%, we're referring more broadly to the CBUAE's FIT programme — a digital transformation initiative for the financial sector, of which open finance is a major pillar. What the UAE has done within that pillar is genuinely exceptional. They built one national hub — the world's first centralised national open finance infrastructure — and mandated all 200 financial institutions to connect to it. Rather than asking each institution to build the same thing independently, they laid down a national railway for the entire market.
What makes this even more remarkable is that the regulatory framework and licensing structure developed in parallel with the technology — which you rarely see. We currently have around 15 third-party providers with in-principle approvals to build their own solutions, and around 20 banks already live with their APIs. All of this happened in 18 months. For context, the UK took five years to reach a comparable milestone.
Host: Saudi Arabia also just issued its very first open banking licence — to Lean Technologies — in March. How significant is that for the Kingdom?
Nihal Abu Ghattas: It's a defining moment. It signals that Saudi open banking has moved from testing to open for business. This first licence sets a benchmark and sends a clear invitation to every other player in the market. And it didn't happen in a vacuum — Lean had already collected over one million accounts and analysed 101 billion transactions in the sandbox environment. For them to cross into full licensing is a major milestone, and it opens the door for the wider ecosystem to follow.
Host: The UAE and Saudi Arabia are taking very different approaches to open finance. What are the key differences?
Nihal Abu Ghattas: It really comes down to who builds the rails. The destination is the same — better financial services for consumers and businesses — but the routes are different. The UAE built one centralised national hub and connected all market participants to it, optimising for speed and an aggressive rollout timeline. Saudi Arabia took a more phased, decentralised approach, allowing banks and fintechs to build the rails themselves, optimising for scalability.
Both are regulator-led. Both are working. And I'd say the region is actually in a fortunate position, because we get to observe two different live models at the same time and learn from both. There's no single right answer here.
Host: The UAE also just launched the first international open finance payment rail. What does that unlock for businesses?
Nihal Abu Ghattas: Cross-border is a huge space, and the UAE has a massive expat population and significant volumes of international business payments. What this rail represents is faster cross-border payments at substantially lower cost. It unlocks use cases like global payroll, merchants making payments abroad, and settlements that previously took days happening in near real time. That's quite significant.
Host: As Co-Chair of the MFT Open Finance Working Group, what's the biggest gap the industry still needs to close?
Nihal Abu Ghattas: Technology is no longer the problem — that's been proven repeatedly. The infrastructure is being built, and banks are incentivised to participate. The next challenge is real consumer education. People need to understand what consent actually means — that authorising the sharing of your data with regulated third parties is safe, secure, and entirely within your control, and that it unlocks better financial services in return. That's the role the Fintech Association needs to play: encouraging the ecosystem to engage and building use cases that genuinely matter for businesses, SMEs, and everyday consumers.
Host: Open finance sounds empowering, but there's also the question of privacy and consumer safety. How does that fit in?
Nihal Abu Ghattas: Open finance is actually the safer option, not the riskier one. Today, to get a loan, you end up printing PDFs and sharing your data with parties that aren't necessarily authorised or regulated. Under an open finance framework, you only share data with licensed, authorised third parties — and you consent to each instance of sharing. You have a consent dashboard, and you can revoke access at any time.
The only reason you share the data is to access better financial services. For gig economy workers or entrepreneurs who don't have a traditional salary certificate, this is transformational — it opens up access to finance based on actual cash flow rather than paperwork. And from a security standpoint, because it operates entirely within a regulatory framework, it is by far the most secure way to share financial data.
Host: Where does open finance go next in this region once the infrastructure is in place?
Nihal Abu Ghattas: The next stage is the value use cases that ecosystem players bring to life. Cross-border payments is one. I read yesterday that rent payments are moving beyond cheques — account-to-account payments are gaining traction with merchants globally because of their cost advantage. And beyond that, we move from simply viewing data in one place to acting on it: AI-driven financial advice, automated nudges — "you have idle funds in your account, here's a savings or wealth product that fits your profile."
The real shift is from visibility to action. And beyond open finance, the next horizon is open data — bringing in healthcare data, telecoms data — which allows the entire digital footprint of individuals and economies to grow through the intelligent sharing of information. That's where this is heading.
Host: Growth is coming either way. Thank you so much for joining us today.
Nihal Abu Ghattas: Thank you for having me.
