Article Detail | Fintech Oasis

The Central Bank of Bahrain was first to open banking in the Gulf, and it is still iterating.

First, and still iterating

Bahrain was the first country in the Gulf to mandate open banking, when the Central Bank of Bahrain's rulebook required banks to open customer data to licensed third parties. That early move gave the regulator something its regional peers are still acquiring: years of supervisory experience with live open banking operations.

That experience shows in the refinements. Successive updates to the CBB rulebook have tightened consent management, clarified liability, and extended the scope of data and services covered. Open banking, in Bahrain's hands, is treated as a living framework rather than a one-off directive.

The ecosystem effect

The framework has produced a small but real ecosystem of licensed third-party providers operating under CBB supervision, alongside the country's domestic payment infrastructure, BenefitPay. The combination — open data, regulated providers, and a national payment switch — gives Bahrain a degree of financial plumbing coherence that larger markets are still assembling.

For a small economy, that coherence is a strategic asset. It makes Bahrain a credible testbed for financial innovation and a reference point for regional regulators drafting their own regimes.

The regional comparison

Bahrain's open banking framework is now one of several in the Gulf — Saudi Arabia and the UAE have since launched their own — but it retains a first-mover's depth. The question is no longer whether open banking will exist in the region, but how the regimes interoperate.

The CBB's next contribution may be less domestic and more connective: helping align the region's open banking standards so that a provider licensed in one market can operate across others. That is the unglamorous work that turns national frameworks into a regional market.