A region that a decade ago ran largely on cash is building the financial architecture of the future at a pace that should command attention in Tel Aviv. The MENA fintech market, valued at roughly $6.35 billion in 2026, is projected to reach $11.46 billion by 2031 — a compound annual growth rate of over twelve per cent. Saudi Arabia hit its Vision 2030 target of seventy per cent cashless transactions two years ahead of schedule, in 2023, and has since raised the bar to eighty per cent by the decade’s end. The UAE has become the world’s most aggressive regulatory sandbox for digital assets. Egypt is racing to bank half its adult population digitally. And Bahrain, for all its post-Gaza political caution, continues to operate one of the most sophisticated fintech licensing regimes in the developing world.

Israel, with over five hundred fintech companies and the densest per-capita technology ecosystem on the planet, sits at the geographic centre of this transformation. Whether it participates in it, or watches from the sidelines, depends on decisions being made right now.

The Three Pillars of MENA Digital Finance

Three structural forces are converging across the region simultaneously, and the interplay between them is what makes MENA’s digital finance trajectory distinct from that of Europe or Southeast Asia.

The first is state-directed cashlessness. Unlike the organic, consumer-led adoption pattern of mobile payments in Kenya or China, MENA’s digital payments revolution is being driven top-down by sovereign mandates. Saudi Arabia’s Financial Sector Development Programme, a pillar of Vision 2030, treats the elimination of cash as national infrastructure policy. SAMA, the Saudi central bank, launched its first phase of open banking licensing in early 2026, allowing regulated fintechs to offer commercialised account information and payment initiation services. The digital riyal — a wholesale central bank digital currency developed through Project Aber with the UAE and now integrated into the BIS-led mBridge platform — is positioning Saudi Arabia’s payment........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)