Modernizing Payments for 2030 and Beyond in MEA

Disintermediate either to protect today’s revenue or create tomorrow’s

Consumers still trust banks to store value, but they increasingly use multiple fintech apps for front-end services, money that would otherwise flow through the bank’s own channels. That reality raises a strategic question for every bank: is fintech activity a new revenue play to join, or a defensive play to protect existing revenue streams? In truth, it’s both, and your integration strategy decides how much of either you capture.
There’s also a practical hurdle. Even when a bank and fintech agree on a use case, the technical implementation can still take six to twelve months, which is far too slow for an ecosystem that expects plug-and-play solutions. That’s why we discussed API-first stacks, pre-published services on developer portals, and marketplaces of pre-integrated partners to compress the time-to-value.

At Temenos, we focus on enabling banks to innovate faster: OpenAPI services exposed in our developer portal, and pre-integrated fintech options through Temenos Exchange so that banks can add capabilities without a bespoke project each time. The aim is a payments platform that treats fintechs as modular extensions of your own offering, fast to add, safe to run, and easy to govern.

What this means for banks: pick your battles, but make the move. Some embedded plays won’t have immediate P&L, yet they deepen relevance in a client’s workflow and open doors to monetizable services elsewhere. So, be relevant first with the revenue to follow.

Stablecoins and CBDCs are moving from the edge to architecture

The conversation on digital assets has changed. USD-backed stablecoins now have a visible regulatory force behind them, CBDCs are moving from ideas to live pilots in our region. Banks need to plan for digital-asset rails as part of the core payments roadmap not as a separate, future project.

Two points stood out in our session. First, a surprising amount of value is already moving through stablecoins at the wholesale level, even if clients on/off-ramps are still clunky. Second, any future stack must route across multiple “modes of transport”: today’s fiat rails (instant, SWIFT, cards) and tomorrow’s CBDC/stablecoin networks with liquidity, settlement, and compliance handled coherently across both.

Implications for your stack: Incorporate digital-asset awareness into routing and settlement; prepare for on/off-ramp friction; and ensure risk, liquidity, and regulatory controls span both fiat and tokenized rails. Start with small pilots so your teams learn by doing.