Gulf's consumer fintech seat is taken, so Indian players target the infrastructure layer - MENA+ Edition

Indian fintechs are shifting their Gulf strategy away from consumer-facing brands and toward the underlying infrastructure after finding the region’s retail fintech market largely consolidated by local players. Notable developments include Saudi Central Bank (SAMA) authorising Bengaluru-based TotalPay in July as an e-commerce payment technical service provider, Pine Labs’ cloud-native Credit+ deployment for Abu Dhabi’s Wio Bank, and Pine Labs’ earlier agreement with Emirates NBD to provide merchant acquiring services for corporate and institutional clients across the UAE with plans to expand into Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

“For an Indian entrant, the consumer seat was already taken by people who understood the consumer, the culture and the regulator better,” Akshay Jayaprakasan, associate partner at Redseer Strategy Consultants, says.

That assessment frames a growing playbook: rather than competing with incumbents on buy-now-pay-later and wallet brands — categories dominated in the Gulf by Tabby, Tamara and other well-capitalised local firms — Indian founders are selling engineering and processing rails. The logic is pragmatic. Infrastructure and B2B systems are judged on technology and integration capability, not consumer brand trust, making them easier to export across multiple Gulf licensing regimes.

Why infrastructure fits

• Regulatory and market differences: India’s fintech scale benefited from a single, homogeneous market and public rails such as UPI. The Gulf consists of multiple central banks and licensing regimes with different rules on local ownership, data and capital.
• Proven Indian tech: India’s UPI processed 23.6 billion transactions worth about USD 314 billion in a single month (July), demonstrating engineering capability at enormous scale.
• Commercial ties: India-UAE trade reached USD 101.25 billion in FY 2025-26, and India remains the world’s largest remittance market at roughly USD 135.4 billion in FY 2024-25, tying the corridor economically and technically.

Investors and operators point to execution and localisation as decisive. “It’s rarely a lack of capital that holds them back. It’s a lack of patience and localization,” Shane Shin, founding partner at Shorooq Partners, tells MENAStartups.com. Johnson Sasikumar, deputy CEO of the PayTabs Group, adds: “Companies that invest in localization, long-term relationships and regional infrastructure will succeed.” PayTabs itself entered the Indian market in 2023 via acquisition of Chennai-based OGS Pay and positions as a Saudi-based B2B player.

Indian firms are already exporting pieces of sovereign infrastructure: the National Payments Corporation of India co-built the UAE’s domestic card scheme Jaywan and linked UPI with the UAE’s Aani instant-payments platform, with UPI testing links in Qatar. Other commercial moves include Pine Labs’ merchant-acquiring stack being deployed for Wio Bank — a digital lender backed by ADQ, Alpha Dhabi and First Abu Dhabi Bank (FAB) — and Pine Labs’ partnership with Emirates NBD.

Incumbents remain formidable. Network International’s merger with Magnati created an entity serving more than 250 financial institutions, 240,000 businesses and 20 million cardholders across 50+ markets with total payment volume north of USD 400 billion. Local specialists such as Geidea, Tap Payments, HyperPay and Amazon Payment Services continue to compete on regulatory readiness and long-term accountability.

Looking ahead, the most likely route for Indian entrants is a B2B, technology-first approach: sell processing rails, orchestration and cloud-native stacks that respect country-specific card networks and compliance. “Selling infrastructure to banks, fintechs and enterprises depends less on consumer trust and more on the quality of the technology,” Shin says — a rare comparative advantage Indian fintechs can leverage as GCC markets prioritise trusted, locally aligned partners.