Expert Insights from: Punit Thakker, Founding team at PayPal, Checkout.com, and PayTabs. 20 years of experience in Fintech
This article is part of Infoquest’s Expert Voices series, featuring editorial insights drawn from in-depth conversations with sector professionals across the globe. Infoquest connects organizations with the specialized expertise they need to make better decisions, faster.
For years, applying for a loan or getting a financial product approved in the Middle East meant uploading PDFs. Bank statements, printed and scanned. Analysts are reviewing them manually. And anyone who knew their way around a spreadsheet could make those numbers look better than they were.
Open banking is changing that. Across Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and the UAE, regulators are mandating a shift toward API-driven financial infrastructure. This is one that connects banks, fintechs, and customers in ways that simply were not possible before.
Punit Thakker, founder of fraction.com and a fintech veteran with two decades across PayPal, Checkout.com, and PayTabs, sees three specific innovations emerging from this shift. They are reshaping how money moves, how risk gets assessed, and how financial services get built in the region.
From Paperwork to APIs
Before open banking, financial analysis was a manual exercise. A lender would request a bank statement, receive a PDF, and try to piece together a picture of creditworthiness from what was on the page. That process was slow, error-prone, and easy to manipulate.
Open banking introduces consent-based API access to account data directly from the central switch. It pulls verified, real-time financial information that cannot be edited after the fact. That shift is the foundation for everything that follows.
Innovation 1: Account Aggregation
The first innovation is account aggregation, the ability to pull a complete financial picture across multiple accounts through a single API call.
In practical terms, a business or individual with accounts at three different banks no longer needs to submit three separate sets of documents. With their consent, a fintech or lender can retrieve that data by referencing a national ID. This could be an Emirates ID in the UAE or a Saudi Absher ID in KSA, and these are linked to the underlying bank accounts. The result is a verified, consolidated view of income, spending, and financial behavior.
Thakker describes this as the core of the AISP (Account Information Service Provider) framework. The data comes directly from the central switch, which means it cannot be manipulated. For lending, KYC and KYB processes that previously took days can now be completed in minutes.
Innovation 2: Smarter Credit Scoring and Anomaly Detection
The second innovation builds on the first. Once account data is available in real time, machine learning algorithms can parse transaction histories. They can detect patterns and generate credit scoring assessments that reflect actual behavior rather than a static snapshot.
Thakker points to anomaly detection as one of the most immediately practical applications. If a customer who typically spends $50 a day suddenly sees $500 leave their account, the system flags it. That same logic applies to fraud detection, risk monitoring, and real-time credit decisions, all driven by live open banking data.
Fintech companies are building differentiated products here. Rather than relying solely on traditional bureau scores, lenders are layering in behavioral analytics, spending velocity, and transaction patterns. For markets with large populations of underbanked or credit-thin customers, that capability matters enormously.
Innovation 3: Real-Time Payment Initiation
The third innovation is arguably the most visible to consumers: Payment Initiation Service Providers (PISPs) enabling real-time, account-to-account transactions without the friction of traditional bank transfers.
Adding a third-party beneficiary on a conventional bank platform can take two to three hours. Open banking collapses entirely. With user consent, a PISP can initiate a payment in real time, for P2P transfers, merchant payouts, salary disbursements, invoice payments, or QR code transactions.
The commercial logic is straightforward. Interchange fees for card transactions are high. Account-to-account payments cut those costs significantly while improving settlement speed and reconciliation. Platforms like AANI in the UAE are already operating as the infrastructure layer. Additionally, fintech companies are building product experiences on top.
- Aggregate account data across multiple banks via a single API
- Verify identity using national ID linked to bank accounts
- Generate creditworthiness assessments from live transaction data
- Run anomaly detection and fraud pattern analysis
- Automate KYC and KYB without manual document review
SAREP (KSA) · AANI (UAE) · Benefit (Bahrain) · Omanet (Oman)
- Initiate real-time payments directly from a customer’s account
- Enable P2P transfers, merchant payouts, and salary disbursements
- Process B2B invoice payments via account-to-account rails
- Eliminate interchange fees associated with card-based transactions
- Support QR code-based payments for financial inclusion
SAREP (KSA) · AANI (UAE) · Benefit (Bahrain) · CBK Framework (Kuwait)
How Ready Are Banks?
Traditional banks in the GCC are largely on board with open banking, Thakker argues, partly because they see the efficiency gains, and partly because participation is becoming a mandate. But readiness is not uniform. Banks need to adopt ISO 20022, the messaging protocol underpinning account-to-account payments. Also, they need to participate as member banks in the open banking network for the consent flow to function at all.
Where the GCC Sits Globally
By international standards, the region is still early. India’s UPI, the UK’s Faster Payments, and Europe’s SEPA have years of infrastructure and adoption ahead of the GCC. But Thakker sees that gap closing fast, and more importantly, he sees the region moving toward cross-border connectivity.
If GCC country-level networks can eventually talk to each other and connect to global payment rails, it will remove the need for correspondent banking entirely for routine transfers. That, he suggests, is the real long-term prize.
| Market | Framework / Rails | Stage |
|---|---|---|
| Saudi Arabia | SAREP + Fintech Saudi | Active |
| UAE | AANI + Open Finance Framework | Active |
| Bahrain | Benefit Network + CBB Sandbox | Advancing |
| Oman | Omanet | Advancing |
| Kuwait | CBK Framework | Advancing |
| UK | Faster Payments / Open Banking Standard | Mature |
| Europe | SEPA (PSD2) | Mature |
| India | UPI (Unified Payments Interface) | Mature |
Three Things to Watch
What Thakker makes clear is that open banking in the GCC is not a single product or feature. It is a set of rails that makes a new generation of fintech products possible, faster, more accurate, more inclusive, and more cost-efficient than what came before.
Account aggregation is already changing how lending works. Credit scoring models are getting smarter. Real-time payments are becoming infrastructure. For anyone operating in or entering the GCC financial services market, these three innovations are worth understanding in detail.
