MENA’s Open Finance opportunity in the age of AI

The evolution of major technology platforms—from smartphones to cloud computing—illustrates a trend where individual products merge into interconnected systems that intelligently operate as one. This same pattern is unfolding in finance. Once fragmented financial products like digital banks, payment platforms, and accounting software are now becoming part of a unified financial experience.

Artificial intelligence is accelerating this shift, moving beyond individual models to coordinated workflows capable of tackling complex tasks. In finance, disparate data scattered across multiple institutions and platforms still dictate most financial decisions. Businesses reconcile payments across systems, while consumers manually piece together balances and goals before making critical financial choices.

This fragmentation incurs significant economic costs by wasting productivity hours and limiting capital flow efficiency. Estimates suggest an $5.7 trillion financing gap for SMEs in emerging and developing economies, with the Middle East and North Africa averaging a 30% financing gap relative to their GDP. However, emerging technologies offer a solution: connected financial systems that coordinate multiple products and workflows based on a single financial context.

For businesses, this means payments trigger automatic updates across accounting platforms, recalculating cash flow and financing options. For consumers, AI-driven financial guidance becomes more insightful by considering the full financial picture rather than isolated snapshots. Open Finance provides the framework for this coordination by enabling secure data sharing across institutions, subject to the customer's consent.

The UAE's Open Finance framework exemplifies this, offering common infrastructure for secure data sharing and transaction initiation via an API Hub and Trust Framework. By sharing financial data with customer consent, institutions gain a more comprehensive view of a customer's financial world, enabling faster, more informed decisions.

In practice, Brazilian Open Finance implementation has already generated R$5.4 billion in new credit for 6 million customers since 2021. This example demonstrates that with the right ecosystem, Open Finance combined with AI could transform financial decision-making across the Middle East and North Africa, unlocking an unprecedented opportunity for connected financial experiences.