Fintech Galaxy wins UAE Open Finance approval in Gulf data push
Fintech Galaxy, the Dubai-based open finance platform, has secured in-principle approval (IPA) from the Central Bank of the UAE (CBUAE) to operate as a licensed Open Finance provider under Al Tareq, the UAE's national open finance scheme. The move places the company inside a regulated framework for consent-based financial data sharing and service initiation, and signals that the Gulf is moving decisively from open banking aspiration to enforceable infrastructure.
The IPA does not yet confer a full operating licence, but it clears the company to begin building out its integrated platform ahead of final authorisation. Fintech Galaxy says that platform will combine Open Finance connectivity, AI-powered financial intelligence tools, and digital business finance solutions, targeting both financial institutions and the region's large SME base.
A regional licensing arc, not just a UAE story
The UAE approval is the second major regulatory win for Fintech Galaxy in twelve months. The company is already licensed by the Central Bank of Bahrain as an Open Finance provider and is progressing through the Central Bank of Jordan's regulatory sandbox. Taken together, the three-jurisdiction arc sketches a deliberate strategy: establish regulatory beachheads across the Gulf Cooperation Council and Levant before competitors can consolidate their own licensed positions.
That timing matters. Open Finance frameworks are proliferating across the region at pace. Saudi Arabia's open banking programme is maturing under SAMA's oversight; Qatar and Kuwait are at earlier stages. The company that secures multi-jurisdiction licensing first holds a structural advantage in cross-border data-sharing use cases, particularly for multinational corporates and GCC-domiciled banks seeking to serve customers across several regulatory regimes from a single API layer.
"This is not simply the next chapter for Fintech Galaxy. It is the beginning of a much bigger opportunity for financial services in the UAE and the wider region," said Mirna Sleiman, Founder and CEO of Fintech Galaxy.
SME finance as the convergence use case
The company has named SME financial management as a priority vertical, developing a Business Financial Management platform that consolidates banking data, invoicing, payments, reconciliation, cash-flow management, and embedded financing into a single interface. This is where the convergence angle sharpens for a cross-sector reader: the underlying bet is that open finance rails, once licensed and live, create the data substrate that AI-powered credit decisioning and working-capital products require.
For financial institutions in the region, many of which serve large SME books with legacy, siloed infrastructure, the proposition is that a regulated third-party platform can accelerate data-led product innovation without each bank building bespoke connectivity. That mirrors the European PSD2 playbook, but with the added dimension of AI integration from the outset rather than as a retrofit.
Capital and geopolitical context
The broader macro picture is one of deliberate regulatory competition. The UAE, Bahrain, and Jordan are all running licensing regimes designed to attract fintech infrastructure players, positioning their markets as the preferred domicile for the region's digital financial stack. For sovereign wealth funds and institutional investors allocating into Gulf fintech, regulatory clarity is a prerequisite, IPA status meaningfully de-risks an investment thesis that would otherwise be purely speculative.
Open Finance infrastructure also feeds directly into the UAE's wider digital economy ambitions, including its push to capture a greater share of global cross-border payment flows and to develop Abu Dhabi and Dubai as rival hubs for AI-driven financial services. Fintech Galaxy's licensing progress makes it a potential infrastructure node in that architecture, relevant not just to regional banks but to global institutions seeking compliant market-entry routes into GCC consumer and SME finance.
The company's next milestone is converting IPA into a full CBUAE licence, at which point it can begin live commercial operations under Al Tareq. The timeline for that step has not been publicly disclosed.