The year 2025 would be looked back upon as the year the GCC stopped following global FinTech trends and started engineering its own. Through sovereign payment rails, “on-soil” data infrastructure, refined regulations and globally strategic initiatives such as mBridge, the region has built a structural moat that ensures financial autonomy for decades to come.
The financial services landscape of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) has undergone a profound structural metamorphosis in 2025, shifting from a phase of rapid experimentation to one of mature, sovereign-led infrastructure. This transition is not merely an adoption of global trends but seems to be a deliberate engineering of a new financial order tailored by the unique needs of the region and the role it wishes to play in the global financial ecosystem.
Under the visionary guidance of regional regulators, several developments over the course of 2025 have established the foundation for a resilient digital economy. Looking toward 2026 and beyond, this article highlights six pivotal developments from 2025 that will act as pillars of strategic autonomy, market stability and impactful innovation in the region’s Financial Services sector. Each of these developments are grounded in several years of prior work that seem to have pivoted into “execution mode” in 2025.
Pillar 1 – The roll out of sovereign payment rails
The launch of the UAE’s Jaywan, Qatar’s Himyan, Oman’s Maal, following the successes of Saudi Arabia’s Mada, Kuwait’s KNET and Bahrain’s Benefit, represents a foundational declaration of a desire for regional financial sovereignty. These domestic card schemes are mandatory national payment rails designed to reduce systemic reliance on foreign payment networks.
As an example, the Central Bank of the UAE (CBUAE) has issued directives requiring all Licensed Financial Institutions to issue Jaywan cards, ensuring transaction data and fees remain within the UAE. By routing domestic transactions through national switches like UAESWITCH, regulators are localising critical financial data and improving merchant economics by lowering cost of accepting payments. The same can be said about all the other domestic schemes in the region. While these domestic rails ensure local sovereignty, the regional payment system AFAQ is providing the connective tissue for seamless, instant cross-border GCC transfers for B2B payments between corporates in the region. Similar to global models like India’s UPI and Brazil’s Pix, these rails are expected to become the primary route for processing everyday domestic spend, forcing international schemes to pivot toward being interoperability partners for cross-border volume and providers of value-added services to sustain their relevance.
Pillar 2 – Open Finance: The Transition from “View” to “Do”
In 2025, the enforcement of comprehensive Open Finance frameworks transitioned the market from “read-only” Account Information Services (AIS) to Payment Initiation Services (PIS). This development breaks the traditional bank monopoly on the transaction layer by allowing licensed third parties to initiate payments directly from bank accounts.
As an example, SAMA’s Open Banking framework, anchored within the Financial Sector Development Program (FSDP), seems to be explicitly designed to fast-track economic diversification, a key goal of Vision 2030. This proactive regulatory mandate, a hallmark of the Kingdom’s leadership, is projected to drive faster integration than the reactive, market-led models seen elsewhere. It will enable “Pay by Bank” at checkout and foster an explosion in Embedded Finance, where non-financial players telcos and e-commerce giants integrate banking services directly to lower transaction costs.
Pillar 3 – The Emergence of Digital Banks with “muscle”
The era of digital wallets has transitioned into a new wave of fully licensed, well-capitalised digital banks. In 2025, the growth of STC Bank and D360 Bank in Saudi Arabia, alongside the scaling of Weyay Bank (by NBK) in Kuwait and Alizz Islamic Bank in Oman, marked a decisive shift toward full-service digital banking. Furthermore, the market has seen specialised players such as Ruya Community Islamic Bank and Zand Bank in the UAE, and established institutions like the National Bank of Bahrain (NBB) and Kuwait International Bank (KIB), make significant moves to expand their Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) and API offerings.
These institutions are not merely digital interfaces but fully capitalised banks built on modern technology stacks that enable a radically lower cost-to-serve. These digital banks are now deploying AI agents that handle entire workflows, such as instant loan approvals or fraud remediation, without human intervention. Their offerings are strategically designed to target segments larger incumbents have historically underserved such as the youth and gig economy, the spectrum that is the MSME segment, the Web3 sector and non-financial sectors with embedded finance solutions for airlines, telcos and retailers.
A “deposit war” is anticipated in 2026 as these digital-first banks leverage their superior cost structures to offer higher yields and AI-powered personalised insights to attract low-cost deposits, benefiting Consumers and MSMEs with better user experience, higher yields and lower fees. This competitive pressure is forcing traditional incumbents to accelerate their own digitisation or risk losing significant market share to these more agile, data-driven competitors.
Pillar 4 – Project mBridge and the Geopolitics of Multi-Lateral Settlement
The year 2025 marked the definitive transition of cross-border Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) payments from high-profile pilots to a live, commercial reality via Project mBridge. While the first real-value transaction – a direct payment from the UAE to China – was executed in early 2024, it was throughout 2025 that the platform reached the “systemic maturity” required for large-scale sovereign trade. Involving the UAE, Saudi Arabia, China, and Hong Kong, mBridge represents a fundamental paradigm shift in trade finance infrastructure.
This technological milestone has converged with the broader strategic momentum of the BRICS+ nations, who are actively seeking an alternative to the legacy correspondent banking model and SWIFT network. By utilising “atomic settlement” – the instant, simultaneous exchange of assets and cash – mBridge effectively establishes multilateral rails offering the global financial ecosystem much-needed optionality and resilience that ensure trade continuity during times of external volatility.
2026 should see more BRICS+ partners integrate into this framework, which will drive this initiative beyond a technical achievement to becoming a critical tool for geopolitical resilience and energy security. For the GCC, this will enable settlement in vital trade corridors using national currencies and facilitating a strategic rebalancing of global financial influence. By establishing these sovereign rails, the region is engineering a financial moat that ensures trade continuity and autonomy regardless of external geopolitical volatility.
Pillar 5 – Data Sovereignty, Refined Licensing and the “On-Soil” Mandate
The regulatory changes in 2025 across the GCC have tangibly engineered moves toward technological and data sovereignty. Strong mandates, such as the UAE’s modernised Stored Value Facilities (SVF) regulation and SAMA’s stringent capital and operational requirements in Saudi Arabia, have fundamentally redefined the cost of market entry. These frameworks do more than ensure solvency of participants in the financial ecosystem; they mandate that critical financial data resides physically within national borders – a move that reflects the visionary leadership’s commitment to treating data as a vital national asset.
This ‘on-soil’ requirement has necessitated a strategic re-architecture of the FinTech stack. While global hyperscalers like OCI, AWS, GCP, and Azure have responded with significant local investments, the rise of regional sovereign cloud and infrastructure leaders is providing the true bedrock for compliance.
In the UAE, Core42 (a G42 company) and Moro Hub lead the charge in sovereign AI and data residency, supported by the massive scale of Khazna Data Centers. Saudi Arabia has seen a surge in localised capacity through STC Cloud and emerging players like DataVolt. This trend extends across the peninsula – Oman Data Park, Ooredoo in Qatar, LEAN and ZainTECH in Kuwait and Beyon in Bahrain have all rolled out infrastructure that will be the bridge between legacy banking and cloud-native agility. These players will act as the bedrock for development of sovereign AI – ensuring that localised Large Language Models are trained on regional data within these secure, on-soil environments, thereby considering local nuances that global models often overlook.
By establishing this local-first infrastructure, the GCC leadership has not only laid the groundwork to secure national data but has created a blueprint for regional resilience is worth emulating. Far from being a mere hurdle, this local-first infrastructure serves as a ‘structural moat,’ fostering a resilient ecosystem where innovation is grounded in regional security. For FinTech’s outside the region, success in the GCC now requires moving beyond a ‘plug-and-play’ model toward establishing a deeply embedded, local operational presence.
Pillar 6 – The shift from voluntary ESG to mandatory sustainability
In 2025, the GCC leadership signalled that the transition to a net-zero economy is as much a financial challenge as it is an environmental one. As an example, the CBUAE solidified this by issuing the Climate-related Financial Risk Management Regulation, mandating that financial institutions integrate climate risk into their core governance and capital planning, which was further reinforced by legislative changes that embedded sustainable finance into the CBUAE’s statutory objectives.
This regulatory shift is a unified regional movement with central banks of all other GCC countries mandating a variety of measures from comprehensive sustainability reporting to the advancement of green financial solutions for funding of infrastructure.
For FinTech’s, this creates the potential for a new green moat. Innovation in 2026 will be defined by platforms that can automate ESG data collection, carbon-indexed lending, and green Sharia-compliant products.
As the region moves beyond this watershed year, the shift of multiple initiatives from high-level strategy to a persistent execution mode marks a permanent change in the GCC’s financial DNA. The six pillars established in 2025 – sovereign rails, open finance, digital banking maturity, multi-lateral settlement, data sovereignty and green finance – are no longer distant goals but the active engines of a self-sustaining regional economy. By prioritising systemic resilience and national autonomy today, the GCC has not only protected its future but has provided a global blueprint for how innovation, when steered by visionary leadership, can deliver enduring impact with minimal turbulence. The ‘watershed’ of 2025 has charted a permanent new course for the region, ensuring that the steady flow of localised, secure financial innovation will redefine the GCC for decades to come.
