Startup Profile

• Founded: 2017

• Core Solution: MENA's first and largest regulated open banking platform, connecting banks, fintechs, businesses, and consumers via a universal Application Programming Interface (API) for secure data sharing and payment initiation.

• Markets Served: Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom

• Growth Outlook: Expanding AI-native financial infrastructure across GCC, integrating acquisitions of Vyne and Servable, deepening bank coverage in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and UAE

What is Tarabut?

Tarabut is MENA's leading regulated financial technology platform, connecting the region's entire financial ecosystem including banks, fintechs, businesses, and consumers, through a single platform. The company is connected to a broad network of banks across Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

The platform operates in two regulated capacities. As an Account Information Service Provider (AISP), Tarabut can retrieve a customer's financial data from their bank in real time, enabling services like consolidated account views, credit assessments, and financial planning tools. As a Payment Initiation Service Provider (PISP), it can trigger payments with authorization directly from a customer's bank account to a merchant or service, bypassing traditional card networks and the fees associated with them.

Tarabut provides this functionality through a universal API, a single standardized interface that any financial service provider can connect to once in order to access multiple banks. Without a platform like Tarabut, providers would need to negotiate and build separate technical connections with each bank individually, a process that is slow, expensive, and difficult to scale. Tarabut handles the connectivity, security, consent management, and regulatory compliance in between.

How was Tarabut built?

When Abdulla Almoayed founded Tarabut in 2017, open banking did not exist as a regulated category in the Middle East. Banks lacked the incentive and technical capacity to open their systems to third parties individually. Fintechs lacked the regulatory standing and resources to negotiate access bank by bank. 

In established markets like the UK and Europe, regulatory frameworks such as the Payment Services Directive 2 (PSD2) which required banks to share customer data with authorised third parties, had begun unlocking a wave of fintech innovation. No equivalent framework existed in the MENA region, and the financial services sector remained largely closed, with customer data siloed within individual banks and no standardised mechanism for fintechs to access it.

Tarabut’s competitive edge was in being first. By entering the CBB Regulatory Sandbox in 2018 and graduating as its first successful participant, Tarabut established the template for how open banking would work in Bahrain and, by extension, across the region. Each subsequent regulatory approval, in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and the UK, built on that initial credibility and infrastructure. Tarabut positioned itself as the regulated intermediary that handled both sides: building standardized API connections to banks while managing the security, consent, and compliance requirements that regulators demanded.

How has Tarabut grown?

Tarabut’s growth has been shaped by three interlocking forces: the capital it raised to fund expansion, the acquisitions it made to broaden its capabilities, and the strategic partnerships it built to deepen its market reach.

Tarabut has raised across multiple rounds from a seed round in 2021 — reported as the largest fintech seed round in MENA at the time — through to its Series A. The calibre of investors tells its own story, the involvement of a global payments giant like Visa and a leading global growth equity firm like Tiger Global signals that Tarabut's model has attracted not just regional confidence but international validation.     

That capital & confidence translated into strategic action & expansion through acquisitions. In August 2024, Tarabut acquired Vyne, a London-based A2A payments platform authorised by the FCA, bringing real-time bank-to-bank payment capabilities to the Middle East. This addressed a gap in the regional payments landscape where card-based transactions dominated and direct account-to-account payments were underdeveloped. In January 2026, Tarabut acquired Servable, a Bahrain-founded AI engineering platform built for regulated industries, positioning the company to evolve from open banking connectivity to an AI-native financial platform capable of intelligent credit decisioning, fraud detection, and personalised financial services.

Partnerships have extended Tarabut’s reach further. In May 2023, Tarabut partnered with Visa, an investor in their funding round, to develop new open banking products and solutions, connecting Tarabut's API infrastructure with Visa's global payments network and signalling that the world's largest payments company saw open banking in MENA as a market worth backing. In the Saudi market, real-time financial data access opens the door to instant, data-driven SME lending — directly addressing the SAR 300 billion SME financing gap identified in the Kingdom.

How did the ecosystem enable Tarabut’s growth?

Tarabut's story is inseparable from Bahrain's decision to build a regulatory environment that actively enabled fintech innovation.

When the Central Bank of Bahrain launched its Regulatory Sandbox in 2017, the same year Tarabut was founded, the timing was not coincidental but convergent. The CBB recognised that open banking would require a controlled environment where new business models could be tested without exposing the broader financial system to untested risk. Tarabut, in turn, needed exactly that environment to develop its platform with live bank connections. Being the first company to enter and graduate from the sandbox gave Tarabut a structural head start in technology development, in regulatory credibility, and in shaping the very standards that would govern open banking in Bahrain.

Bahrain's structure as a financial hub amplified these advantages further, with the CBB overseeing banking, insurance, and capital markets under a single unified framework rather than the fragmented oversight common in larger markets. This streamlined not only the process of obtaining its AISP and PISP licences but also the building of bank partnerships, allowing Tarabut to build broad bank connectivity in Bahrain's concentrated market. That breadth of coverage, achievable precisely because of the market's compact size and cooperative regulatory culture, allowed Tarabut to demonstrate a fully functional open banking ecosystem before expanding to the larger and more complex markets of Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

This combination of a forward-leaning regulator and active ecosystem support is what the Chief Financial Officer Tariq Sanad credits as the foundation for everything that followed, "Bahrain gave us the conditions to build and prove regulated open finance early - a regulator and institutions willing to move at the pace of innovation, and ecosystem support through the Labour Fund (Tamkeen) that helped us turn an idea into infrastructure. That foundation is what we now build on as we scale open finance across the GCC."

The Big Picture

What began as a single-country sandbox experiment has grown into a regional financial infrastructure platform. Today Tarabut is MENA's first and largest regulated open banking platform – live and regulated across Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, with significant operations in Saudi Arabia and the UAE, building on its Bahraini foundations. The acquisitions of Vyne and Servable signal the next phase: evolving from connectivity infrastructure to an AI-native financial platform serving the data-driven needs of the GCC's banking and financial sectors.