Lean Technologies Pioneers UAE Fintech with Open Finance Framework Completion

Lean Technologies has taken another big stride in the UAE’s fintech landscape, becoming one of the first Third Party Providers to graduate from the country’s Live Proving programme under the Central Bank’s Open Finance Framework. For anyone following the region’s digital finance push, this moment feels a bit like watching a long‑planned project finally shift from sketches to bricks and mortar.

From what’s been shared publicly, Lean spent the Live Proving phase working hand‑in‑hand with local banks and tech partners to meet the regulatory and operational checks set by the Central Bank. It sounds like a bit of a faff, honestly, but a necessary one. With that now completed, the company is cleared to support organisations building Open Finance‑powered products, from secure, consent‑based data sharing to payment initiation under the UAE’s AlTareq trust initiative.

Tewfik Cassis, Lean’s Chief Product Officer, described the milestone as a defining moment for both the company and the wider ecosystem. He highlighted years of investment in infrastructure and compliance, which he says now place Lean in a strong position as adoption accelerates. I reckon he’s spot on about timing; the UAE has been gearing up for this shift for a while, and the whole sector seems ready to move from ambition to execution.

Whenever I speak with founders across the MENA region—something we often do at Arageek as part of our mission to empower the ecosystem—they tell me that regulated access to financial data can be a game changer. And believe it or not, some of the simplest use cases, like clean account verification, still trip up even the most promising startups.

The national Open Finance Framework is meant to fix that. By creating a compliant path for next‑generation payment experiences and data‑driven services, the UAE is building the sort of infrastructure that tends to spark whole new categories of products. Lean’s graduation is being seen as a signal that the ecosystem is edging closer to full production readiness. On the flip side, it will still take time before consumers actually feel the impact in their day‑to‑day banking—these things move slower than people expect, well… I mean, usually.

Lean says it will continue working with banks, regulators and industry partners to expand use cases and support market adoption. The company has already built a sizable footprint since its founding in 2019, connecting more than 2 million accounts and processing over $4 billion in transactions. Plenty of firms in the region would be chuffed to bits with numbers like that, even if they’re definately not the end of the road for a player aiming to become core financial infrastructure.

All told, this milestone won’t grab headlines the way a flashy funding round might, but it’s one of those quiet shifts that often reshapes what local startups are able to build next.

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