FWDstart · 2026-07-06 · 47 min
For Tewfik Cassis, Lean Technologies is not an open banking company, or at least not only that. It’s trying to become the AWS for fintech in the Middle East, an infrastructure layer so reliable, ubiquitous and necessary that payments, verified financial data, underwriting and money movement can be built on top of it without merchants stitching together five or six providers. That ambition now stretches well beyond Lean’s original open banking shorthand. Founded in 2019, Lean has raised more than $100M to date, giving it the backing to push deeper into Pay by Bank, Open Finance and the broader fintech infrastructure stack across the region. We sat down with Lean CPO Tewfik Cassis on the eve of the company’s biggest product launch to date, as it prepared to roll out its Pay by Bank suite across deposits, collections, checkout and pay-by-link. In the UAE and Saudi Arabia, Lean is building across account-to-account payments, open finance data, underwriting and money movement, while keeping one eye firmly on what comes next, from stablecoin-powered remittances to agentic commerce.
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