The UAE skipped open banking and went straight to open finance

The UAE has adopted an open finance model rather than an open banking one. Central Bank regulations provide for an API Hub, a trust framework and common infrastructure through which authorised third parties can access customer data and initiate transactions with consent — and the scope extends beyond bank accounts to a wider range of financial products and services. The framework is known as AlTareq, and Commercial Bank of Dubai, First Abu Dhabi Bank and Abu Dhabi Islamic Bank are among the institutions live with API-enabled services. The difference from open banking is not semantic. Open banking gives a third party access to current and savings accounts. Open finance gives it access to insurance policies, investment holdings, pensions and credit facilities as well. That changes what can be built. A budgeting app on open banking rails knows what came in and what went out. A financial planning product on open finance rails knows what someone owns, what they owe, what they are insured against and what they are saving toward — which is the entire input set for advice. It is a considerably larger prize and a considerably larger governance task, because insurance and investment data is more sensitive than transaction data and the consent model has to be correspondingly stronger. The API Hub is the part other regulators are studying. The UK and EU implementations required every bank to build and maintain its own API and every third party to integrate with each one separately. The result was hundreds of subtly different endpoints, uneven reliability, and an integration burden that weighed heaviest on the smallest firms. A central hub inverts that. Third parties integrate once. Banks connect once. The regulator sits in the middle and can see, in a way it otherwise could not, exactly what data is flowing where and under what consent. The trade-off is that the hub is a shared dependency and the regulator takes on an operational role alongside its supervisory one. The benefit is that a startup can go live in weeks rather than negotiating with each bank in turn — which, for a market building a fintech sector, is the point. Two Gulf approaches are now running in parallel. Saudi Arabia's SAMA began issuing live open banking licences in March 2026 after closing its sandbox, with a framework covering account information and payment initiation. The UAE went wider from the start. Bahrain and Kuwait have frameworks in place; Oman and Qatar remain at pilot or exploratory stage. Each has its merits. Saudi Arabia's narrower scope is easier to implement, easier to supervise and gets working product to market sooner. The UAE's wider scope takes longer to build and covers in one programme what would otherwise be added in a second. The comparison will be settled by which market has more live, revenue-generating open finance products in 2028, and that is not yet knowable from either framework's design.