Open banking is the practice of securely sharing customers’ financial and banking data with third parties, including account information and transaction data. This enables said third parties and financial service providers to offer customers better-targeted services. Also, it is important to note that this information sharing takes place upon each customer’s consent and through open APIs (application programming interfaces), the best of which are provided by Genify.

Since Open banking providers in MENA enable collaboration between various banks and financial service providers, customers can access various financial services from many providers through a single interface, improving their money management and financial habits and situation.

Due to the vital role open banking plays in the banking and financial industries, several open banking players in the MENA region are leading the innovation and change in this field. Continue reading to discover more about these players in the MENA region and what differentiates them from one another.

Lean Technologies: KSA and UAE Markets

First and foremost, Lean aims to create useful, reliable, and secure connections between bank users and banks through banking accounts and applications. Accordingly, Lean builds an integration layer on top of the banking infrastructure in the Middle East, enabling developers to utilize this additional layer in executing creative ideas in applications, elevating the value provided to users.

Lean builds a much-needed infrastructure for fintech in the Middle East, as it offers many solutions, including solutions using payments, solutions for payment operations, and those using data. Additionally, Lean’s products include data aggregation, integrated payments, and payment operations, easily making it one of the open banking players in the MENA region.

Furthermore, Lean Technologies has received a third-party provider financial license from Abu Dhabi’s Financial Services Regulatory Authority. In other words, it received Financial Services Permission to offer third-party regulated services, making Lean Technologies the first fully regulated open banking platform in the UAE and KSA.

DAPI: UAE Market

DAPI is a financial interface enabling fintech applications to implement open banking through initiating payments and accessing real-time banking information. DAPI’s aim as an open banking player in the MENA region is to build the needed infrastructure to allow banking data integration into financial applications.

Based on that, DAPI initiates wire payments within products and it bridges the gap between applications and users, allowing secure payments and real-time data access. Additionally, DAPI excels in providing digital wallets, a seamless payroll, automated accounting, and more.

Regarding MENA open banking players, DAPI connects fintech with banks through open banking, as it initiates payments through banks and provides financial services based on bank statement data. DAPI has about 50 fintech platforms in its open banking pipeline, waiting to connect to banks. This highlights DAPI’s efforts towards solving the lack of connectivity as it adopts a collaborative approach to bridge banks and fintech together.

SaltEdge: Bahrain, Qatar, UAE Markets

Salt Edge is a financial API platform offering open banking solutions for businesses. It builds open banking API solutions that empower businesses to create smart customer services. Furthermore, it has two main focus areas and vectors of activity. The first one is enabling third parties to access bank channels through a unified gateway, characterized by access to account information, payment initiation, and data enrichment. The second focus is developing the technology banks need to comply with the directive’s requirements.

Due to Salt Edge’s employed security measures, it allows stable and reliable connections between financial service providers and their customers. Additionally, it offers fintech solutions with a human touch, international reach, and customizable resources, making it one of the significant open banking players in the MENA region.

Fintech Galaxy: Bahrain and Egypt Markets

FinTech Galaxy was founded in the United Arab Emirates as a global platform facilitating open banking API integration between financial institutions and fintech companies. FinTech Galaxy is also the first central bank-regulated Open Finance platform. In other words, it builds an open finance infrastructure to ensure secure and stable API integrations. It is important to note that open finance is the next step of open banking, as the former includes a broader range of financial services and products, which exceed those related to banking.

Genify: UAE and US Markets

Founded in 2019 and based in the UAE, Genify specializes in the following areas:

• Artificial intelligence.

• Machine learning.

• Recommender systems.

• Credit scoring.

• Personalization.

• Transaction enrichment.

• Credit decisioning.

That said, Genify is one of the leading open banking players in the MENA region. The priority markets are the US and the UAE, followed by the rest of the top open banking platforms in the Middle East, MENA region and Western Europe.

Genify aims to enable banks and fintechs end users to fully understand their spending and instantly get access to loans. The former can be achieved by implementing Genify’s transaction enrichment APIs, while the latter is a result of implementing Genify’s credit scoring API. In other words, banks and fintech companies can elevate the user experience by executing Genify’s APIs.

For example, Genify’s transaction data API is especially beneficial for fintech MENA region that use open banking to let their users see all their transactions across multiple bank accounts in one place. The API organizes transaction information into granular categories while implementing merchant logo integration for an aesthetically pleasing display.

Genify offers banks and fintech companies in the MENA region and beyond the right APIs to make personal finance management a reality via their mobile applications, facilitating an elevated user experience (UX). These APIs cover data enrichment, including data categorization, merchant logo integration, clean merchant names, CO2 footprint, and more.

Finally, data enrichment solutions from Genify are characterized by the following:

• Plug and Play: This feature eliminates the need for manual effort from banks and fintech companies.

• Global Coverage: Genify’s enrichment engine is not bound by geographical limitations. Therefore, it works in any country.

• Ease of Integration: Banks and fintechs can use various enrichment fields with a single API endpoint thanks to Genify.

Discover more information on Genify’s APIs and products for open banking today!