A 2025 Review
The story of Lean has always been a story of building foundations. Over the last six years, we helped introduce Open Banking connectivity to the region. We enabled payments and data in the UAE. We supported the rollout of Open Banking data in Saudi Arabia. And we worked hand in hand with regulators to help design a future where financial services are faster, safer, and more accessible.
In 2025, those foundations became the infrastructure for leading financial institutions. Businesses across lending, insurance, trading, and real estate used Lean to verify identities, initiate account-to-account (A2A) payments, and access real-time financial data that strengthened every type of business decision. These capabilities unlocked new products and opened new revenue streams for Lean’s customers.
The results reflect the scale of that shift. Lean today powers over 350 customers, enabling $4 billion in total processed volume (TPV), helping businesses save over $100 million in card fees, connecting over 2 million users, and verifying more than 2 million accounts across the region. With Lean, institutions moved faster. Customers experienced smoother journeys. Risk and operations teams gained clarity that they had never had before.
2025 marked a new chapter; Lean is the financial infrastructure beneath MENA’s most innovative financial institutions, quietly powering the systems that millions rely on every day.
Built With Our Customers
Lean’s growth came from one place: our customers. This year, over 350 businesses across insurance, lending, trading, marketplaces, real estate, remittance, and more chose Lean to power their payment & data flows.
By listening closely and building alongside our customers, every new product release brought immediate value. Payments became faster and more reliable. Data became richer and more predictable. Verification expanded to support new customer types and new industries.
This close collaboration translated into measurable impact, driving efficiency and scale across the region.
$100M Saved, Billions Moved: Lean Payments
By 2025, Lean’s payments infrastructure was operating at meaningful scale across the region. Financial institutions relied on Lean to move money directly between bank accounts, replacing costly cards with A2A payments: a more cost-efficient and reliable way to pay.
As volumes grew, so did impact. Lean crossed $4 billion in total processed volume, and helped businesses save more than $100 million in card fees. Instant Payments, Guaranteed Payments, and Payouts supported high-volume, time-sensitive use cases, giving businesses the confidence to run core payment flows on Lean.
This was the result of payments that had been built, proven, and scaled alongside our clients.
Guaranteed Payments, Built for Scale
Guaranteed Payments launched as a natural evolution of Lean’s standard Payments API. Designed with the region’s largest enterprises, it addressed a longstanding challenge in A2A payments: achieving instant gratification while maintaining the highest settlement rates.
Instant Payments, automated reconciliation, and payouts now operate as one unified system. Every step delivers a clear, predictable outcome: enabling businesses to credit users instantly with confidence, knowing the payment result is settled and final.
This is how high-volume payments operate when the infrastructure is designed for scale.
As adoption grew, Guaranteed Payments became critical for clients with time-sensitive flows and large daily volumes. Transactions could be treated as final at initiation, removing settlement delays from core user journeys and simplifying operations across finance and product teams.
Payments That Strengthened Customer Experiences
Lean’s payment solution helped businesses cut costs and improve their revenue. By replacing slow, card-based flows with Instant or Guaranteed Payments, clients cut transaction delays, eliminated manual settlement work, and reduced card processing fees. The results speak for themselves: measurable savings, instant transactions, and lower drop-off rates across various industries.
Careem Pay
Using Lean’s Instant Payments, Careem Pay was able to switch from traditional card-based funding to direct bank transfers.
Capital.com integrated Guaranteed Payments to eliminate settlement delays entirely, reducing settlement time by 100%. Deposits are confirmed at initiation, allowing users to trade instantly without waiting for funds to settle.
They also adopted Lean’s Instant Payments for account top-ups, reducing funding costs by 20% compared to cards.
"Lean has been a key partner in modernising how we collect payments from our customers,” said Amira Sajwani, Managing Director at DAMAC Properties.
Their team brought the right expertise to replace legacy processes with a faster, more seamless payment experience. Since adopting Lean, we’ve seen a clear shift toward digital payments and a meaningful improvement in our collection speed.”
2 Million Connected: Lean Data
Lean’s real-time, bank-verified data served as the intelligence layer for better financial decision-making.
By embedding Lean’s Data Insights into their workflows, businesses refined underwriting, introduced second-look lending, adjusted credit limits, and deepened their understanding of customer behavior.
Across the region, Lean connected over 2 million accounts, giving clients the foundation to scale, reduce risk, and deliver data-driven financial products.
Embedding Lean’s financial infrastructure into our workflow has fundamentally strengthened our underwriting capabilities and boosted approval rates,” said Hosam Arab, CEO at Tabby.
“Over the past three years, it’s helped us unlock lending segments that were previously inaccessible, enabling us to serve a broader base of users beyond the limits of traditional credit data.”
Enhancing the Data Quality
This year, Lean rebuilt its data architecture with a storage-first approach. The result was a stable and predictable data layer that delivered consistent response times, fewer errors, and higher reliability for large-scale financial journeys. Businesses gained faster access to income insights, spending patterns, and identity signals that powered their decisioning processes.
Data That Strengthened Customer Experiences
Lean Data helped businesses make informed decisions at scale. Real-time insights delivered through a stable data layer enabled clearer visibility into income, spending patterns, and financial behavioral signals. This led to higher approval rates for qualified customers and smoother product experiences.
Tamara
Tamara integrated Lean Data to access verified income and financial insights directly from users’ bank accounts. This strengthened their underwriting models and increased approval rates for customers who met the criteria but lacked traditional salary data.
2 Million Verified: Lean Verification
In 2025, Lean expanded its Verification Suite into a broad financial infrastructure layer used across KSA and the UAE. Clients relied on Verification to confirm account ownership, validate identity, authenticate freelancers and businesses, and ensure the accuracy of customer banking details before initiating any financial action.
Over 2 million accounts were verified on Lean through more than 6 million verification calls. This reduced payout failures, strengthened compliance processes, improved collections, and enabled businesses to serve new customer segments with clarity and confidence.
Expanding the Verification Infrastructure
Lean’s Verification Suite grew into a system that supports every financial workflow. It retrieves authoritative data from banks and government sources to confirm identity, ownership, and account validity. This enabled clients to prevent fraud, eliminate misrouted funds, accelerate payouts, and create reliable financial operations.
International Verification
Businesses can reliably verify IBAN ownership anywhere, enabling cross-border account verification.
Freelancer Verification
Lean confirms the authenticity and status of any Saudi freelancer and automatically retrieves official government data to ensure they are real, active, and authorized to work.
First-of-its-kind scale for 2M+ freelancers in KSA
KSA’s freelance workforce has long been underserved by traditional credit markets. This year, Lean changed that. By combining government-backed certificate data with our Freelancer Verification & Insights solution, lenders can instantly confirm identity, validate certifications, and access verified cashflow data. This enables faster onboarding, confident underwriting, and new lending opportunities for a workforce contributing over US$19 billion to the economy.
Business Verification
Lean retrieves official Saudi business data directly from trusted government sources to confirm identity, status, and ownership of businesses.
Verification That Strengthened Customer Experiences
Lean’s Verification Suite became a central part of payout flows, collections, lending decisions, insurance operations, and KYC & onboarding.
Tawuniya
By integrating Lean’s account verification solution, Tawuniya drastically reduced the number of disbursement bounce-backs and misrouted funds leading to faster claims and processing.
Building With Security In Mind
While 2025 was a year of growth, that growth was grounded in trust and strong regulatory partnerships. Lean strengthened its compliance and security foundations, enabling businesses and customers across the region to operate with confidence.
Working alongside forward-thinking regulators like SAMA in KSA and CBUAE in the UAE, we continued to help shape frameworks that make the region’s financial ecosystem more secure, transparent, and inclusive. Initiatives such as the UAE’s Open Finance Framework and Saudi Arabia’s Open Banking Framework are enabling faster payments, smarter credit decisions, and expanded access to financial services. By collaborating closely with these regulators, Lean is helping build the infrastructure that powers seamless financial services for businesses and customers alike.
Regulatory Leadership
This year, Lean reached two major milestones with the UAE’s forward-looking regulators. We received In-Principle Approval (IPA) from the UAE Central Bank under its Open Finance framework, marking a key step toward expanding secure financial services for millions of users. We also secured the Category 3C license from ADGM, empowering Lean to embed compliant, enterprise-grade financial services into everyday workflows.
These achievements reflect our close collaboration with regulators and our shared commitment to a safer and more connected financial ecosystem.
Security You Can Count On
Security is central to everything we build. Lean achieved SOC 2 Type II certification, covering all trust criteria, and aligned with UAE NESA standards. These independent validations confirm that every transaction, data exchange, and integration on our platform meets the highest standards of protection, reliability, and resilience.
Our Team, Our Growth
As demand for our products expanded, so did our team.
We welcomed new talent across engineering, product, operations, and leadership, each bringing expertise to support building the region’s leading financial infrastructure.
Alongside this growth, we opened a new Dubai office, a space designed to match the scale and ambition of Lean today. It’s a place where ideas meet execution, and where the work shaping the next decade of financial experiences comes to life.
Showing Up Across the Region
2025 was also a year of deeper presence in the ecosystem.
We took part in major industry events, including Money20/20, FII, and Seamless in Riyadh, showcasing our work on payments, data, and verification to partners, regulators, and the region’s leading financial decision-makers. These engagements reflect our commitment to building the backbone of the region’s financial infrastructure.
These engagements reflect our commitment to shaping the region’s financial infrastructure.
On the sidelines of Money20/20, we hosted Lean’s Majlis2020, an exclusive gathering of industry leaders, regulators, and clients. The Majlis offered a platform to discuss the future of payments and data, share insights from Lean’s ecosystem, and foster collaborations that will shape the region’s next-generation financial infrastructure.
Looking Into the Future
The foundations built in 2025 created powerful tailwinds for the future of finance across the Middle East. The UAE and KSA, together a $2 trillion economic bloc, are entering a period of rapid transformation. Real-time payment rails are emerging. Open banking frameworks are accelerating. Enterprises are embedding financial capabilities into every workflow. The financial fabric of both countries is being rewired, and the pace of change is faster than ever.
With these shifts underway, Lean’s role as the region’s financial infrastructure becomes even more important. In 2026, we will deepen this infrastructure across payments, data, verification, and more, helping institutions move money and information faster, more reliably, and with greater intelligence.
Pay by Bank in the UAE
The UAE’s Open Finance Framework will introduce Pay by Bank, a modern account-to-account payment rail. Lean will provide the high-availability infrastructure that powers instant initiation and settlement, creating a new standard for payment reliability across the country.
Read more about Open Finance payments in the UAE here.
Building Open Banking Payments in KSA
Saudi Arabia is preparing the ground for Open Banking payments under SAMA’s framework. Lean will work with banks, enterprises, and regulators to ensure the ecosystem is ready for a national shift from cards to direct bank payments, one of the most important transitions in the Kingdom’s financial history.
Read more about Open Banking payments in the UAE here.
Next-Generation Decisioning for Lenders
Lending in the region is evolving quickly. To support this shift, Lean will introduce next-generation insights and analytics that allow institutions to build custom credit models using rich Lean attributes. This will enable lenders to underwrite with greater intelligence, speed, and confidence.
With accelerating regulatory progress, deep partnerships, and a region poised for transformation, 2026 will be a defining year. Lean will continue building the rails and intelligence that power the financial ecosystem of tomorrow.
