Best Open Banking Initiative 2025: ADCB
ADCB becomes first bank certified for UAE open finance - earning our Best Open Banking Initiative Award.
Open banking frameworks only matter when someone goes first. ADCB did exactly that in August 2025, becoming the first bank certified by the Central Bank of the UAE for the Al Tareq Open Finance platform and completing the country's first consent-driven financial data sharing transaction.
Al Tareq represents the UAE's national open finance infrastructure - a regulated framework enabling customers to share their financial data securely with authorised third parties. While several banks had been preparing for certification, ADCB was the first to achieve it, and more importantly, the first to execute a live transaction under the new framework.
This matters because open banking in the Gulf has often been discussed in theoretical terms. Regulatory bodies across the GCC have published consultation papers and roadmaps, but actual implementation has lagged. ADCB's certification and first transaction turned policy into practice, setting a benchmark for every other bank in the UAE to follow.
The technical work behind this achievement was substantial. ADCB built the consent management infrastructure, API gateway, and data-sharing protocols required to meet CBUAE's certification standards. The bank also had to ensure that customer data flows met both local data protection requirements and the specific technical specifications of the Al Tareq platform.
We selected ADCB for this award because being first in open banking carries disproportionate significance. The first certified bank shapes customer expectations, influences how fintechs and third-party providers build their integrations, and demonstrates to the wider market that the framework works in practice. ADCB took on the complexity and uncertainty of going first, and delivered.
The implications extend beyond the UAE. As other GCC nations develop their own open finance frameworks, ADCB's early move positions the bank as a reference point for the entire region. Financial institutions across the Gulf will study this implementation as they prepare their own open banking strategies.
Visit ADCB to learn more.
Assigned by Sebastien Parker, Senior Research Analyst, Global Banking Monitor, September 2025
