Stitching together financial infrastructure from the Gulf to the world

A Saudi bank wants to launch a digital wallet. On paper, it sounds simple: build an app, plug in a ledger, and enable top-ups and payments.

In practice, it sets off a painfully slow, fragmented chain reaction.

Each integration is separate. Each requires regulatory sign-off. Some vendors are excluded by data-residency rules, others demand costly custom hosting. By the time the pieces fit together, six to twelve months have usually passed.

For customers in a country where 71% of the population is under 35 and accelerating toward being 80% cashless by 2030, that delay clashes with the seamless experiences they are used to in dining, travel, and shopping.

For banks, the stakes are even higher. The market demands speed. Yet the underlying plumbing, reliant on fragmented foreign vendors, resembles quicksand rather than the springboard a sandbox is meant to be.

It’s a paradox. You have an economy racing to digitise, constrained by the very infrastructure that should be enabling it.

Saudi banks now hold more than one trillion dollars in assets. Digital payments already account for 79% of retail transactions, and financial inclusion has also expanded rapidly, with nearly 94% of adults in Saudi Arabia having access to formal banking services, compared to around 70% in 2018. The Gulf is on the cusp of a cashless economy, but new products still take months, sometimes a year, to launch.

Arguably, what finance has lacked is a platform moment. E-commerce had Shopify, which turned retail infrastructure into a service. Communications had Twilio, which made messaging programmable. Cybersecurity had CNAPP, which unified fragmented tools.

Finance in the region has had no equivalent, only a patchwork of global vendors pasted onto legacy cores.

For Mohamed Oueida, the frustration was personal. In Riyadh, he saw promising products stall in committee rooms and vendor queues. Each new launch meant another maze of contracts, integrations, and regulatory checks. Even simple features could take half a year, often longer, and by the time they went live the market had already moved on.

In 2022, Mohamed founded Stitch, a startup underpinned by the belief that the Gulf doesn’t just need better vendors, it needs a unified stack, built locally from the ledger up, so banks and fintechs can launch quickly without compromising compliance.

Most infrastructure firms start narrow and expand. Stitch took the opposite path, building a full-stack platform from the outset rather than layering modules over time.

The thesis was that fragmentation was the root cause of delays, so nothing short of a unified sweep could solve it. By bringing ledgers, payments, cards, deposits, lending and onboarding under one roof, Stitch set out to cut product launch times from six to twelve months down to less than 90 days, a colossal 80% reduction.

At its core sits a single API suite. Ledgers, wallets, lending, payments and compliance are integrated by design. Features like Arabic interfaces and Sharia-compliant lending meet Gulf realities, while the broader architecture of unified ledgers, embedded compliance and in-region hosting applies anywhere regulators are strict and sovereignty is non-negotiable, from São Paulo to Nairobi.

The ledger is the foundation. It records transactions in real time and supports multiple products without reconciliation delays. Cards and wallets sit directly on top, with issuance, multi-currency support and settlement built in. Lending and deposits flow from origination to repayment within the same system, with both conventional and Sharia-compliant structures supported. Onboarding integrates KYC and KYB checks, fraud controls and consent management, while user interfaces work natively in Arabic. Payments connect to national switches, POS networks and international rails. Compliance runs throughout, with dashboards, audit trails and reports embedded, all hosted locally to satisfy sovereignty requirements.

The advantage of this design is scale and simplicity. In a legacy setup, each module would come from a different provider, each requiring its own integration and regulatory approval. Stitch reduces the cycle to around ninety days by presenting regulators with a single, compliant system hosted in-country. That shortens certification time and lowers the risk of failure at integration points.

The business model also sets Stitch apart. Global peers often charge per transaction or API call, a structure that scales poorly for high-volume banks. Stitch instead offers predictable, expansion-friendly pricing. For institutions this means cost clarity; for Stitch it means revenue tied to adoption and growth rather than usage spikes.

By embedding sovereignty and regulation into its core architecture, Stitch argues it can deliver both speed and compliance. What was once a drag on innovation becomes an accelerant.

The case for unified infrastructure is perhaps best exemplified in consumer finance, which has undeniably become the Gulf’s standout success. Tabby, valued at $3.3 billion, now processes more than $10 billion in annualised transactions. Tamara, reached unicorn status in 2023 and just secured a $2.4 billion credit facility led by Goldman Sachs and Citi. With BNPL volumes in the Middle East forecast to reach $5.8 billion in 2025 and over $11 billion by 2030, demand for consumer finance products is undeniable.

The infrastructure behind it, however, is less certain. Financing products require onboarding, credit checks, transaction routing, disbursement and collections, all tightly integrated and regulator-approved. Banks trying to compete with digital-native players still face half-year integration cycles. Stitch offers a fast track that doesn’t cut corners. With pre-integrated modules for KYC, lending, payments and reconciliation, it cuts launch timelines by up to 80%. That difference will determine whether incumbents can participate in the next wave of consumer finance or cede the ground entirely.

The same logic applies across a whole host of products. Multi-currency wallets stitched from foreign vendors raise sovereignty issues. Cards issued abroad create delays. Conventional and Islamic loans require fragmented workflows. Stitch collapses these into its core ledger: wallets, cards, lending and reconciliation all flow from one system, cutting approval cycles from months to weeks.

A recent deployment with Tanmeya Capital, a Saudi lender, showed this in practice. The bank went live on Stitch in just 28 days, consolidating origination, servicing and reporting into a single system. Loan products that once took half a year to launch were created in weeks, and compliance reporting became automatic. As Fahad Al Balooshi, Vice President of Investment Banking at Tanmeya, put it: “Working with Stitch changed how we operate. We moved from a fragmented setup to an integrated, automated platform in under a month.”

Many of the region’s most discerning investors have bought into the thesis. In 2025 Stitch raised $10 million in Seed funding, led by Arbor Ventures, COTU Ventures, Raed Ventures and SVC, with participation from Marqeta founder Jason Gardner and Saudi payments veteran Abdulmalik AlSheikh. The mix combined regional expertise in navigating Gulf regulators with global experience in building financial infrastructure.

Arbor, a global fintech investor with stakes in Tabby and Lean, has long argued that the Middle East’s mix of rapid adoption and sovereign oversight makes it fertile ground for local champions that can scale globally. Raed, based in Riyadh and an early backer of Tabby, Hala and Salla, has built a portfolio around firms solving problems unique to the Gulf with the potential to expand abroad. Stitch fits both patterns: it is a homegrown company built to solve the Gulf’s toughest bottlenecks, embedding compliance and sovereignty from the start, but with a platform designed to scale well beyond the region. 

Investors see a model forged in one of the most demanding regulatory environments, with the potential to be exported globally. For global peers the question is how far this playbook can travel; for local investors it is how firmly it can take root. Both are betting on the same idea that speed and compliance can go hand in hand.

It’s worth foregrounding that the Gulf’s push for financial infrastructure is not only commercial but also deeply political. Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 aims to raise cashless transactions to 70% by the end of the decade. The UAE has set similar targets, with regulators driving digital wallets, faster payments and embedded finance as part of their national agendas.

This means infrastructure is intertwined with state-building. Banks and fintechs that meet consumer demand for speed and convenience are also, by proxy, helping deliver government policy. Platforms like Stitch, built to satisfy local regulators and host data in-country, align commercial incentives with sovereign priorities. That alignment has often accelerated adoption, as seen with past state-backed support for digital ID systems and instant-payment rails.

The strategy fits a broader Gulf pattern. Sovereign funds are backing domestic champions in AI, data centres and payment systems, all framed as pillars of digital sovereignty. Financial infrastructure is a natural extension. Just as cloud providers are now required to host locally, financial stacks are expected to embed compliance and sovereignty from the outset.

For Stitch, this creates both tailwinds and scrutiny. Success means becoming part of a national backbone. Failure would raise questions not only for investors but for policymakers who view digital finance as central to diversification and competitiveness.

And the implications extend very much beyond just the Gulf. If Stitch proves that speed and compliance can coexist in one stack, it may offer a model for other emerging markets where regulators are assertive and data sovereignty is non-negotiable. Exporting the playbook, however, will require adaptation, as what satisfies Riyadh or Abu Dhabi invariably may not satisfy Jakarta or Lagos.

Ultimately, the test is no longer whether Gulf banks can digitise. The tools exist, and Stitch has already proven it. The real question is whether they will choose to. In markets where two-thirds of consumers already live cashless, hesitation is no longer caution. Bluntly, it is retreat.

The institutions that move in ninety days will own the future. Those that wait six months will be left building for a past that no longer exists.

This article is part of FWDstart’s partner programme series. We follow stringent editorial standards, and while we collaborate closely with our partners, final editorial control rests solely with FWDstart to ensure the authenticity and creativity of our content. All partnerships are disclosed clearly, and we only collaborate with organisations we genuinely admire – Stitch is one of them.