AnalysisGulf
Cross-border payouts into the Gulf: which licence
Under the CBUAE regulation, cross-border fund transfer is a named service and is absent from the lower licence category. Remittances are defined separately.
Market analysis
What the rules require, and what the market charges.
What the rules actually require and what the market actually charges — open banking frameworks, scheme mandates and gateway economics across the Gulf, EU and US.
BahrainGlobalGulfSaudi ArabiaUAE
AnalysisGulf
What a payments licence requires in Saudi and the UAE
Licence categories and capital floors in the SAMA and CBUAE payment regulations, and where the two regimes do not line up.
AnalysisGlobal
PCI SAQ A: what changed for embedded checkout
SAQ A still means the merchant never touches the card number. The January 2025 change is an eligibility rule for pages that embed the payment form.
AnalysisGulf
sarie and Aani: the Gulf instant payment rails
What SAMA and the Central Bank of the UAE have published about sarie and Aani: launch dates, who participates, and the customer fee cap sarie put in a circular.
AnalysisBahrain
Bahrain open banking framework: dedicated interfaces and testing
Bahrain’s rules are unusually explicit about what banks owe AISPs and PISPs: a dedicated interface, a testing facility, uptime parity and core data access.
AnalysisGulf
Getting sandbox access to Gulf gateways as a non-resident developer
What the public signup paths of Gulf payment providers required, where they blocked a foreign evaluator, and which routes were self-serve versus sales-led.
AnalysisGulf
Open banking in the Gulf: UAE, Saudi and Bahrain compared
How the three Gulf frameworks differ on architecture, licensing, scope and operational burden, and what that means for teams building across them.
AnalysisSaudi Arabia
Saudi open banking is now a licensed activity
SAMA moved open banking from sandbox supervision into licensing in March 2026. What the official announcements establish, and what they still leave unsaid.
AnalysisUAE
The UAE's security profile: ten-minute tokens and no DPoP
What the AlTareq FAPI profile actually mandates — and the six places it narrows FAPI 2.0 into a single permitted option.
AnalysisUAE
Getting into UAE open finance: the Trust Framework
Certificates, roles and certification — what a TPP has to clear before it can make its first production API call in the UAE.
AnalysisGlobal
FAPI 2.0: what compliance actually requires you to build
The MUST-level requirements of the FAPI 2.0 Security Profile, and which of your existing OAuth assumptions each one breaks.
AnalysisUAE
UAE open finance pricing: what the API Hub actually costs
The published UAE fee schedule, the page allowances on data sharing, and the pricing rules that quietly constrain how you build.