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Lean Technologies and Ziina have launched what they describe as the UAE's first one-tap Pay by Bank experience under the Open Finance framework, letting Ziina users connect their bank account once and make future wallet top-ups with a single tap, with no need to re-enter credentials or get redirected to a bank portal each time.
The feature is built on Lean's Deposits product, which carries an account-on-file consent lasting up to 12 months so customers do not re-authenticate on every payment. It extends a partnership that produced the UAE's first live customer-initiated Open Finance payment in January, when Ziina became the first entity in the country to execute account-to-account payments through the Central Bank's regulated Open Finance APIs.
The companies framed the launch as evidence that Pay by Bank in the UAE has moved beyond one-time transactions, with the regulated rails now live and the focus shifting to recurring experiences that make the method part of everyday spending.
Omar Hamada, VP of Sales at Lean, said Pay by Bank had until now only been available as single instant payments: "Working with Ziina, we've shown that the infrastructure is capable of supporting recurring, low-effort payment experiences, the kind that make a payment method genuinely part of how people pay every day."
Talal Toukan, co-founder and head of engineering at Ziina, said funding a wallet is one of the most common actions in the app, "so making that experience faster and more seamless was a natural next step for us."
The launch was announced at Lean's flagship event in Dubai, where the company unveiled a four-product Pay by Bank suite including the Deposits product underpinning the Ziina feature.
Founded in 2019, Lean is one of MENA region's financial infrastructure providers, having supported more than 400 companies, processed over $5 billion in transaction volume and connected upwards of 2 million accounts.
Ziina, founded in 2020 by Faisal, Sarah and Talal Toukan, is a Central Bank-licensed consumer and business payments platform serving more than 260,000 users, which raised a $22 million Series A led by Altos Ventures and holds a Stored Value Facility licence from the Central Bank of the UAE.
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