In 2017, the concept of open banking was a foreign regulatory idea in the Middle East. Fast forward to today, and Bahrain-founded Tarabut has become the region’s largest regulated open finance platform, building the connective tissue for a new generation of financial services across the GCC. The company’s journey from being the first graduate of the Central Bank of Bahrain’s (CBB) Regulatory Sandbox to a multi-market operator with major acquisitions is a blueprint for fintech success in MENA.
Quick Facts
- Founded in Bahrain in 2017 by Abdulla Almoayed.
- Regulated and live in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE.
- Acquired UK-based payments platform Vyne and Bahraini AI firm Servable.
Pioneering a Market That Didn’t Exist
When Abdulla Almoayed founded Tarabut, the regional financial sector was a collection of closed systems. Unlike Europe, which had regulatory mandates like PSD2 forcing banks to open up, MENA’s banks had little incentive or technical capacity to share customer data with third parties. Fintechs, in turn, were stuck, unable to negotiate access on a bank-by-bank basis.
Tarabut’s first-mover advantage was strategic. By entering the CBB Regulatory Sandbox in 2018, it became the test case and eventual template for how open banking would function in Bahrain. Graduating as the sandbox’s first successful participant gave Tarabut immense regulatory credibility and a head start in building the core infrastructure, establishing itself as the trusted intermediary between banks and fintechs.
The platform operates in two key regulated capacities. As an Account Information Service Provider (AISP), it retrieves customer financial data in real-time for services like personal finance management. As a Payment Initiation Service Provider (PISP), it triggers payments directly from a customer’s bank account, bypassing traditional card networks. Tarabut provides this through a universal API, saving fintechs the immense cost and complexity of building individual connections to each bank.
Fueling Growth with Capital and Key Acquisitions
Tarabut’s expansion has been powered by high-calibre investors and strategic acquisitions. After closing what was reported as MENA’s largest fintech seed round in 2021, the company attracted backing from global giants like Tiger Global and Visa in subsequent rounds, signaling international validation of its regional model.
This capital was quickly deployed to expand its capabilities. The 2024 acquisition of Vyne, a London-based Account-to-Account (A2A) payments platform, brought sophisticated real-time bank transfer technology to the Middle East, a market historically dominated by card transactions.
In 2026, the acquisition of Servable, a Bahrain-founded AI engineering platform, marked a pivotal shift. This move positions Tarabut to evolve beyond simple connectivity, embedding intelligent decisioning for credit scoring, fraud detection, and personalized services directly into its open finance infrastructure.
Partnerships have been another critical growth lever. A 2023 collaboration with investor Visa aims to develop new open banking solutions by combining Tarabut’s API infrastructure with Visa’s global payments network. In Saudi Arabia, Tarabut’s platform directly addresses the Kingdom’s SAR 300 billion SME financing gap by enabling instant, data-driven lending.
The Bahrain Advantage: A Launchpad for Regional Scale
Tarabut’s rise is deeply intertwined with Bahrain’s proactive regulatory strategy. The CBB’s launch of its Regulatory Sandbox in 2017 created the controlled environment Tarabut needed to test its model with live bank connections, effectively co-creating the market’s standards from the ground up.
Bahrain’s unified regulatory framework, where the CBB oversees banking, insurance, and capital markets, streamlined licensing and partnership-building. This allowed Tarabut to achieve broad bank connectivity in a concentrated market, proving its model at scale before expanding into the larger, more complex ecosystems of Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
Tariq Sanad, the Chief Financial Officer at Tarabut, credits this foundation for the company’s subsequent success.
“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.”
About Tarabut
Tarabut is MENA’s first and largest regulated open banking platform, connecting banks, fintechs, and businesses to consumers through a universal API. The platform enables secure data sharing and payment initiation, serving as the core infrastructure for a new wave of financial services. Tarabut is fully regulated and operational across Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, with a recent headquarters inaugurated in Riyadh.
Source: Startup Bahrain
