Gulf’s consumer fintech seat is taken, so Indian players target the infrastructure layer
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Indian fintechs have all but given up on winning the Gulf’s fintech customers. The region’s consumer market — buy now, pay later, digital wallets, everyday payments — already belongs to Tabby, Tamara, and a cluster of well-capitalized local players. The window of competition now is narrowing down to the infrastructure that makes them possible.
The Saudi Central Bank (Sama) authorized Bengaluru-based TotalPay in July to operate as an e-commerce payment technical service provider, making it the first Indian fintech with specific KSA authorization to deploy payment gateway and orchestration architecture to Saudi merchants, as we reported at the time. Six months earlier, PineLabs signed a partnership with Abu Dhabi-based Wio Bank — a digital lender backed by ADQ, Alpha Dhabi, and First Abu Dhabi Bank (FAB) — to run its merchant acquiring stack on Pine Labs’ cloud-native Credit+ platform.
That competition window didn’t shift by accident. India’s own regulation is contributing to it, after India’s central bank reined in the credit-on-wallet model that the Gulf’s regulators let run, Akshay Jayaprakasan, associate partner at Redseer Strategy Consultants, tells EnterpriseAM.
The Gulf had a genuine consumer-credit gap — young, mobile-first consumers, a large thin-file expatriate population, low credit-card penetration, demand for zero-interest, Shariah-compliant products — and Tabby and Tamara built the region’s first fintech unicorns off that gap.
But that gap, for now, appears to be full. “For an Indian entrant, the consumer seat was already taken by people who understood the consumer, the culture and the regulator better,” Jayaprakasan explains.
Two playbooks
While India regulation is contributing, the mismatch runs deeper. India’s own fintech breakout decade was built on a single, vast, homogeneous market, public rails like UPI, and unit economics tuned for enormous volume at very thin margins. “Almost none of that transfers,” Shane Shin, founding partner at Shorooq Partners, tells EnterpriseAM.
SOUND SMART- India’s Unified Payment Interface (UPI), the real-time mobile payments infrastructure India introduced in 2016 that catapulted its fintech industry, was also ahead of its time compared to similar systems among many emerging markets. That UPI system now processes a massive amount of instant transactions — last July alone, it processed 23.6 bn transactions worth some USD 314 bn.
The Gulf inverts nearly every one of those conditions — not one market but six central banks and six licensing regimes, each with its own rules on local ownership, data, and capital — and smaller populations that are far higher-value, which rewards depth and average revenue per user (ARPU) over volume.
Neither capital nor the product itself is the constraint. “It’s rarely a lack of capital that holds them back. It’s a lack of patience and localization,” Shin says. “Succeeding in the Gulf requires more than a strong product. Trust is earned with regulators, banks, enterprises and merchants over time… Those looking for a quick market entry may find it more challenging than expected,” Johnson Sasikumar, deputy CEO of the PayTabs Group, tells us. “Companies that invest in localization, long-term relationships and regional infrastructure will succeed. PayTabs is a Saudi-based fintech B2B player that entered the Indian market back in 2023 after acquiring Chennai-based OGS Pay.
The corridor is a real pull
India-UAE trade reached USD 101.25 bn in FY 2025-26, with both governments targeting USD 200 bn by 2032. India remains the world’s largest remittance market at roughly USD 135.4 bn in FY 2024-25, with the GCC a core source market of these remittances. Bengaluru-based OnFinance AI is opening its third global office in Dubai, and Indian companies now make up more than 30% of Dubai’s startup community, with c. 3.9k new Indian firms joining the Dubai Chamber of Commerce in 1Q 2026 alone. “Dubai is increasingly the headquarters of convenience, while India remains the engine,” Sidharth Sogani, founder and CEO of Manama-based BlueAster Capital, previously told us.
India is already exporting parts of its own sovereign fintech infrastructure to back the flow. The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) co-built the UAE’s domestic card scheme, Jaywan, and has linked India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI) with the UAE’s Aani instant-payments platform. That link-up is also expanding across the GCC, with NPCI also testing a UPI connection in Qatar, while exploring similar moves in other GCC markets.
Testing the alternative
India-based Pine Labs, however, is trying another direction: Sell the rails to other businesses, rather than go directly to consumers with a brand. That’s the smarter strategy for a market this contested, Jayaprakasan explains. “Indian companies must redesign products around the GCC’s country-specific card networks, domestic schemes, bank integrations, and compliance requirements to ride this next fintech wave,” he adds.
Infrastructure and B2B models can cross borders more cleanly than consumer ones, because a bank evaluating processing rails is buying engineering, not a brand relationship, Shin tells us. “Selling infrastructure to banks, fintechs and enterprises depends less on consumer trust and more on the quality of the technology, which is often exactly where these founders are world-class,” he explains.
Pine Labs’ partnership with Emirates NBD as a traditional bank serves as one of the early use cases for this cross-border ease argument. The pair signed an agreement back in 2024 where the India-based Pine Labs would provide the same merchant acquiring stack it is now setting up for Wio Bank to provide the same solution for NBD’s corporate and institutional clients, starting with the UAE and expanding later into Saudi and Egypt.
The incumbents are not sitting idly
But even that infrastructure-driven, B2B side of the fintech market is not without competition. Local incumbents aren’t just sitting on the consumer market; they’re also positioned to compete for the infrastructure layer Indian entrants are eyeing, Jayaprakasan cautions.
The field now has big names, Jayaprakasan tells us. The UAE-based Network International completed its merger with digital payments player Magnati, a subsidiary of FAB, under Brookfield-led ownership last October, creating a combined entity that serves more than 250 financial institutions, 240k businesses, and 20 mn cardholders across 50+ markets, with total payment volume north of USD 400 bn. “Geidea has built a strong Saudi position by pairing payments with restaurant, retail and business-management software; PayTabs, Tap Payments, HyperPay and Amazon Payment Services compete across online and omnichannel payments. Their edge isn’t the product,” he says.
“Enterprise payment decisions in the Gulf are rarely based on a single product or price point,” PayTabs’ Sasikumar tells us. Banks, governments, and large businesses want regulatory readiness, local infrastructure and long-term accountability. They want trust, and that isn’t transferable — it’s built market by market. “Scale in one market does not automatically translate into relevance in another,” he adds.
What Indian fintechs bring instead is a cost-efficient, high-volume technology stack, tested at a scale few Gulf incumbents have had to operate at, plus deep engineering talent, Redseer’s Jayaprakasan says. Whether that’s enough is the open question.
What separates the winners
Three things distinguish the Indian entrants that stick from the ones that stall, Shin says — and product quality isn’t one of them. Do they treat Gulf regulation as a moat to build early, or a tax to defer? Are they building for the market in front of them, or exporting something designed for somewhere else? And are the founders actually in the region, or running it at arm’s length from headquarters back home?
“The ones who fail tend to run the Gulf as a sales outpost. The ones who succeed either move, or bring on a serious local team with real authority,” Shin says.
The regulatory bar is about to rise across the entire class of fintech B2B providers. The Central Bank of the UAE’s Federal Decree-Law No. 6 of 2025 came into force last September, broadening the regulatory approach to bring open finance services, payment services using virtual assets, and enabling technologies explicitly under CBUAE licensing — and those enabling systems did not necessarily require licensing before. That means that such players now have until 16 September to obtain a license or approval; operating without one would become an offense carrying fines of up to AED 500 mn (USD 136.2 mn).
Where do Indian players go from here?
If there’s a sequence to how this plays out, Shin’s bet is infrastructure and B2B software first, AI-enabled financial services close behind, and consumer payments last, if at all. Consumer is the most crowded, most regulated, and most local part of the stack — exactly where Gulf incumbents and domestic rails are strongest, and where trust is slowest to win as an outsider. Meanwhile, the infrastructure layer is different. Issuing and processing infrastructure, embedded finance, regtech, SME-lending rails — sold to institutions on the strength of engineering, travel across borders far more cleanly than a consumer brand.
AI-driven financial services is the layer now forming on top of that, Shorooq’s Shin says, but he doesn’t expect the sharpest model to decide the winners. “The founders who understand that distribution and compliance beat novelty almost every time, wherever they’re from, are the ones worth watching,” he says.
What’s next: Sasikumar expects more Indian companies to establish partnerships, offices, or initial commercial operations across the Gulf to enter the fintech ecosystem. However, whether or not those translate into a meaningful and sustainable footprint will depend on their willingness to localize, he says. It also depends on their go-to-market localization — “the region is not one market. GCC countries like Saudi Arabia and the UAE, alongside markets such as Jordan and Egypt, each have their own regulatory frameworks and business dynamics,” he adds.