Fintech Garden Podcast: Episode 160

Arab Financial Services (AFS) Group CEO Samer Soliman laid out a practical playbook for open finance in the MENA region in episode 160 of the Fintech Garden Podcast, hosted by Igor Tomych of DashDevs on June 23, 2026. Soliman — whose firm is owned by 37 banks and financial institutions, serves more than 70 clients across over 20 countries, and operates core payments and fintech infrastructure in the region — argued that regulator-driven frameworks in the UAE and Bahrain are producing materially different results than market-led approaches elsewhere.

“Sky’s the limit,”

Soliman used the phrase to describe open finance’s potential, and later answered a direct question on AI in payments with a single-word verdict: “Boom.”

Soliman told host Igor Tomych that the defining characteristic of the MENA approach is intentional regulator leadership. He pointed to the UAE’s issuance of Open Finance Licenses and Bahrain’s long-running open banking framework from the Central Bank of Bahrain as evidence that regulators have “designed the frameworks, granted the licenses, set the deadlines, and pushed the ecosystem onto the new rails.” The result, he said, is a level competitive surface where every regulated player must expose the same APIs and meet the same requirements so competition shifts to customer experience rather than data hoarding.

He stressed that the region has intentionally moved beyond “open banking” to “open finance,” expanding the perimeter from payments and transaction data to include insurance, wealth and other regulated financial services. That broader scope, Soliman argued, accelerates network effects and allows use cases to emerge concurrently rather than sequentially.

• Payment initiation: moving funds between bank accounts without card or network intermediaries, with unit economics that already work.
• Credit scoring: improving lending and Buy Now Pay Later underwriting by removing credit-bureau lag and showing likely limits in advance.
• Financial planning: personalised deposit facilitation and goal-driven savings built from a customer’s full financial picture.

Soliman issued a stark warning about data quality. “Garbage in, garbage out,” he said, illustrating how banks often receive consolidated merchant transactions that lack item-level detail. He noted that merchants — not banks — hold the granular line-item purchase data, and without merchant cooperation the AI layers built on top of open finance will underperform. Product teams, he advised, should design for broad spending patterns and adjacent context and use AI conservatively to infer the rest.

On strategy, Soliman reframed the competition: customer ownership is no longer guaranteed by data sitting in a single bank. “No one owns the customer by default,” he said, arguing that the winner will be the firm that delivers the best ongoing experience and captures relevant signals earliest in the decision cycle. He drew analogies to Google and Apple to make the point that winning requires being present at the moment decisions are made, not merely accumulating a data lake.

Looking ahead, Soliman believes the immediate commercial value of open finance in MENA will concentrate in the three use cases above, while longer-term leadership will go to vendors who solve item-level data flow and firms that secure first-mover visibility into decision points. With regulators setting the rails and AI beginning to amplify signals — “Boom” — the next phase of open finance, he suggested, will reward operators who combine product experience with early, high-quality data access.