Before it’s everywhere, it’s in FWDstart. Subscribe for $99 and save 17% on the first year to stay ahead.
In May of this year, the UAE’s open finance infrastructure logged AED 19.8 million in successful payments. Only three months later, in August, that monthly figure had nearly quadrupled to AED 78.2 million.
Quite the respectable jump in activity for a system whose formal national launch, according to the people charged with running it, was still pending when we spoke last week.
Thomas Catchpole, CTO of Nebras, the company operating the central infrastructure behind the country’s AlTareq open finance programme, put the cumulative payment total at roughly AED 250 million as of our conversation, with thousands of customers already using it despite no national marketing campaign behind the rollout.
Best of all, anyone can interrogate the transaction data. A public dashboard built by the Nebras team shows, with refreshing granularity, which banks are handling payments, which providers are generating them and how often customers make it through authorisation, offering a degree of visibility that’s often very hard to come by.
Source: AlTareq’s Open Finance Dashboard
After being steered towards it at Money20/20, we spent an unreasonable amount of time following the money through Lean, Wio and Mashreq. As Catchpole put it when we asked about making the figures public, “It’s just representing the reality of what we’re seeing.”
🔓 The full version of this article is for paid subscribers only.
Arguably more interesting still is how the team is thinking about who, or what, might be initiating those payments in the future. One reason for rebuilding the site and its documentation was to make the infrastructure intelligible to AI agents, with the longer-term ambition of software working out which services to use, what permission a customer has already granted and when it needs to ask for more.
Those considerations are becoming more pressing with seemingly every new personal agent launch. The company behind Instinct, the still-invite-only assistant that went viral among Silicon Valley insiders in August, raised $1 billion at a $10 billion valuation this week.
In an interview published on Patrick O’Shaughnessy’s Invest Like the Best this week, founder Noah Shinn said more than $1 billion a year in transaction volume was already passing through the assistant, and that its user base was growing roughly 10% a day at the time of the interview.
Yesterday, OpenAI threw its hat into the increasingly crowded ring of personal agents with Dots, joining Meta’s Muse and Grok Bot in competing to take more everyday tasks off our hands, apparently with a fairly similar brief for their respective design teams.
For the UAE’s banks and fintechs, that convergence brings considerable opportunity, along with some uncertainty over who gets to influence the customer’s next decision. They’re building more ways for people to access financial services just as those people are being invited to delegate more of the choosing to software.
Which raises the rather consequential question of what an agent understands “best” to mean. The cheapest option, the safest, the most convenient, or the one that most closely fits a customer’s circumstances? Those preferences won't always align, and the answer becomes more complicated when the assistant’s own commercial incentives enter the picture.
🔓 The full version of this article is for paid subscribers only.
It’s a conversation slowly but surely gathering steam in this neck of the woods. Off the back of Ziina co-founder and CEO Faisal Toukan’s article on the convergence of open finance and AI, published in Wamda this week, this seems as apt a moment as any to put emerging ambitions alongside activity we can actually measure.
That question becomes more pointed when you look at how these assistants might make their money. Much has been made of what Instinct’s business model might actually be.
According to Shinn, he’d like merchants to pay for the business his assistant brings them. If agents increasingly become an important route to the customer, cheaper payments could leave room for a new commission along the way.
Whether that leaves the merchant better off depends on what the assistant charges and which existing costs, if any, it replaces.
The UAE’s numbers give us an unusually useful launchpad for examining who’s building the market, what customers are using today, and what the future of payments might look like regionally as that agentic future keeps getting closer.
A growing market, but still early days
For all that activity, it’s worth bearing in mind that things are still exceedingly nascent, and the list of companies generating it is, accordingly, remarkably short.
Lean accounts for…
Become a paid subscriber today to enjoy unlimited access to FWDstart
To support our journalism, and unlock all of our stories and original analysis about the the MENA startup and VC ecosystem, subscribe below.
