Open Banking in MENA: Lessons from Production

Mar 15, 2026 · 1 min read
talks

A practical look at building open-banking integrations against real MENA regulatory regimes: consent flows, strong customer authentication, API reliability, and the operational realities of running them in production.

Open Banking FinTech Security
Ahmed K Emara
Authors
Ahmed K Emara (he/him)
Chief Technology Officer · FinTech & Platform Engineering
I’m a chief technology officer with 18+ years building and scaling technology organizations across regulated FinTech, payments, e-commerce, and enterprise platforms. Today I’m CTO at Tarmeez Capital, a Saudi FinTech financing and investing through Islamic Sukuk, where I took the platform from a four-person pre-launch team to 40+ people and a CMA/SAMA-licensed launch. I write about backend engineering, databases, security, microservices, and FinTech infrastructure — the problems I actually hit in production.