Lean Technologies launches Pay by Bank suite on UAE Open Finance rails

Lean Technologies, the MENA financial infrastructure firm, has launched a suite of products that let businesses collect payments directly from customers' bank accounts, expanding its push to offer an alternative to cards in the UAE.

The four products, unveiled at the company's Pay by Bank event in Dubai on 18 June, run on the UAE's Open Finance framework, the regulated rails the central bank introduced to let licensed firms initiate bank-to-bank payments. FWDstart attended as the event's media partner.

Deposits targets trading, investment and remittance platforms with one-click top-ups and an account-on-file consent lasting up to 12 months, removing the need for customers to re-authenticate each time. Collections serves anyone taking recurring or credit repayments, from BNPL providers to rental, utility and telco firms, with a balance check run before each pull.

Checkout, aimed at e-commerce, uses delegated SCA to authenticate first-time buyers on their opening transaction, which Chief Product Officer Tewfik Cassis called "pioneering" and a first for Pay by Bank in any market. The fourth, Payment Links, is a low-code product letting sales reps, showrooms, schools and property firms request payment without a technical integration.

Lean said it has processed more than 20 billion dirhams in Pay by Bank payments to date, and that the shift from cards has saved its clients hundreds of millions of dirhams in transaction costs.

Now around seven years old, the company has operated account-to-account payments in the UAE since 2022, building around the gaps before regulated infrastructure existed, and in January executed the country's first customer-initiated Open Finance payment alongside Ziina.

Cassis framed the products as an answer to long-standing friction, noting early Pay by Bank flows required customers to remember banking credentials and wait up to 24 hours to add a beneficiary before a first transaction.

He credited the UAE's Open Finance programme, alongside the central bank's Nebras platform and Al Tareq API framework, for providing the standardised rails the suite is built on, and said the products may reach Saudi Arabia next. Lean is well positioned to follow through on that, having in March secured SAMA's first Major Payment Institution licence for open banking, graduating from the Saudi central bank's regulatory sandbox to live deployment in its other core market.

Among launch and design partners named were Careem, whose Careem Pay flow for remittances and wallet top-ups now runs on Lean's deposits product, with Careem Pay's Mohammad El Saadi appearing in a fireside conversation.

In a separate panel, CEO and co-founder Hisham Al-Falih spoke with Tabby co-founder Hosam Arab and Mal founder Abdullah Abu-Sheikh, the latter fresh off a $230 million seed round for his AI-powered Islamic digital bank, about the region's long road from cash-on-delivery to account-to-account rails.

Arab, who co-founded Namshi before Tabby, recalled that 90% of the e-commerce platform's transactions were cash on delivery at launch in 2010, "the most inconvenient, friction-full payment method available, but they just preferred it." On how Tabby now assesses payment providers, he said the surface commoditisation is deceptive: "When you start to dig deeper, there's very few that actually can address all four of these requirements," referring to customer experience, cost, reliability and scalability.

The launch lands as Lean, which has raised more than $100 million from backers including General Catalyst, Peak XV (then Sequoia India), and Shorooq positions itself for a potential public listing while weighing expansion into stablecoins, cross-border payments and remittances.

Co-founder Aditya Sarkar closed the event on the company's longer-term ambition for the rails to disappear into the products built on them. "Infrastructure shouldn't demand attention," he said. "It just becomes part of the experience, so built in that you stop noticing it's there."