Businesses across MENA still juggle separate systems for payments, invoicing, accounting, and holding funds, and that fragmentation has a cost. It is one reason financing gaps for small and medium-sized enterprises remain so wide across the region, and why the UAE's move toward Open Finance deserves attention from founders and financial institutions alike.
The scale of the problem is not small. The International Finance Corporation estimated back in 2019 that the financing gap for micro, small and medium enterprises in emerging and developing economies stood at $5.7 trillion. In MENA specifically, that gap has averaged close to 30% of GDP, a figure that points to how many viable businesses simply cannot get the credit or financial tools they need to grow.
What the UAE has built
The Central Bank of the UAE has introduced an Open Finance framework designed to address part of this problem. It rests on common infrastructure for secure data sharing and transaction initiation, backed by an API Hub and a Trust Framework. In practice, this is meant to let financial data move safely between institutions and platforms, so that a business's financial picture is not locked away in disconnected systems.
This matters because the past two decades have already digitised much of banking, payments, accounting and investing. What has lagged is the connective tissue between those digitised pieces. Open Finance frameworks are an attempt to build that connective tissue at the infrastructure level, rather than leaving it to individual companies to solve one integration at a time.
Brazil's head start
Brazil offers the clearest evidence of what this kind of framework can do when given time. Banco Central do Brasil began treating Open Finance as an ecosystem capability in 2021, not just a compliance requirement. The results since then are concrete: between the start of implementation and June 30, 2025, R$31 billion in credit operations originated from analysis of data shared through Brazil's Open Finance system.
Of that, R$5.4 billion in new credit was generated specifically by fintechs, reaching six million customers. That is a meaningful signal that Open Finance, when built as genuine infrastructure rather than a narrow regulatory box to tick, can unlock credit for people and businesses that traditional banking channels were not serving.
Why this matters for UAE fintech
For UAE-based fintechs and financial platforms, including companies like Ziina that build tools for how businesses and individuals move and manage money, the Central Bank's Open Finance framework represents an opportunity to build products on top of shared infrastructure rather than around it. If the UAE's rollout follows a trajectory similar to Brazil's, the near-term effect would be more fintechs able to originate credit and other financial products based on richer, better-shared data, rather than each institution working from its own limited view of a customer or business.
The bigger regional question is whether this UAE framework becomes a template others in MENA can adapt, given how consistently the region's SME financing gap has been measured near 30% of GDP. Brazil took several years to move from framework to measurable credit outcomes. The UAE is now several years into building its own version of that infrastructure, and the coming period will show whether similar outcomes follow here.
