Abdulla Almoayed and the business of being let in

A bank is an awkward place to arrive with a good idea. It already has customers, procedures, a regulator and several excellent reasons to leave things alone. Abdulla Almoayed chose to build a company whose prospects depended on getting such institutions to share. His account of the work now includes a wonderfully unglamorous refrain: “Emails won’t solve this.” For a technology founder, it is a useful admission. The connection that matters sometimes requires a chair on the other side of a table.

Almoayed is the founder and chief executive of Tarabut, the Bahrain-born financial infrastructure business. He talks about showing up, keeping promises and staying involved after a contract is signed. His argument is that institutions need confidence in the people delivering the software. A bank has to live with the consequences long after the partnership photograph has disappeared from everyone’s feed. The photograph is considerably easier to arrange.

The family business had an alternative ending

He grew up in a trading family with four generations of business behind it. A future within AK Almoayed, the family group, was available. Independence appealed more. “I’m definitely the black sheep in the family, I’ll tell you that,” he said in 2021. It is an affectionate description of a career choice with substantial consequences: he wanted to build something he could direct himself.

His education included business management at the University of Westminster and an MBA at London Business School. Investment banking preceded the infrastructure venture. Through Almoayed Technologies, he developed an investment business concerned with the region’s digital economy. The interests were broad, including education, logistics, cybersecurity and financial technology. Tarabut grew within that wider ambition to improve the systems on which other businesses depend.

There is a pleasing complication in the independence story. In his chosen business, succeeding would require cooperation on an unusual scale. The founder seeking more control over his own work had picked an industry where permission, standards and other people’s decisions would determine when that work could reach customers.

First, a place to test the idea

The idea was taking shape in December 2017. Bahrain had no open banking rules under which his proposed platform could simply begin operating. In early 2018, he applied to the Central Bank of Bahrain’s regulatory sandbox. A sandbox gives a financial technology company room to test a service under supervision. For Tarabut, it provided a route from an interesting proposal to something a bank could actually use.

By December 2018, Bahrain had issued the regulatory framework and mandated adoption by banks. Tarabut’s infrastructure went live the following year. That sequence matters. The company and its operating environment were developing together. A founder could write code and hire a team, but neither activity could produce the missing rules. The work included helping people understand why the arrangement should exist.

Almoayed has credited access to an engaged regulator with making the business possible. His experience suggests a particular kind of entrepreneurial persistence: continue the conversation, make the safeguards credible and give the institution a reason to participate. It is patient work for someone trying to move quickly.

The paperwork between a person and a loan

Open banking can sound like a debate intended to keep conference rooms occupied. Its practical attraction is easier to understand. Someone applying for finance may need to assemble statements and prove their income. Information already held by financial institutions has to travel through the applicant before another institution can assess it. There are several opportunities for delay, and very little entertainment.

With the customer’s permission, an authorised service can retrieve relevant financial information through secure software connections called APIs. A lender can use that information to check income and assess an application. Tarabut supplies infrastructure that helps banks, financial technology companies and other providers make those connections and use the resulting data.

Almoayed’s explanation of the business has consistently centred on the services that become possible afterwards: more useful financial products, quicker verification and less work for the applicant. Tarabut’s name may remain behind the scenes while another institution serves the customer. That is part of the attraction of infrastructure. Many businesses can build on the same foundation.

A matchmaker learns the neighbourhood

In 2022, he described Tarabut’s role as matchmaking between providers and customers. That year brought partnerships with Riyad Bank, Saudi British Bank, Alinma Bank and Banque Saudi Fransi. Tarabut also became the platform partner for the Dubai International Financial Centre’s Open Finance Lab, a programme intended to help banks and regulators explore how the technology could work.

Those relationships tell you something about his method. He was assembling a network of institutions with different responsibilities, rather than asking one group to vanish so another could prosper. Banks would continue to hold deposits and extend credit. New businesses would gain ways to develop services around them. Each additional connection could make the network more useful.

In his own writing in 2023, Almoayed stressed the role of governments in encouraging competition and economic diversification. He also identified regional fragmentation as an obstacle. A useful service in one jurisdiction does not automatically arrive with permission to operate in another. Expansion involves learning a new set of requirements, even when the product’s basic purpose stays familiar.

“Banking is all about partnerships.”

Abdulla Almoayed, 2021

Buying the future, then reconsidering the timetable

Tarabut’s acquisition of London-based payments company Vyne closed on 1 August 2024. Vyne specialised in account-to-account payments for online businesses. The plan was to bring that capability into Tarabut’s Middle Eastern operations as the relevant regulatory frameworks developed. It was a tangible expression of the belief that access to data and the movement of money would increasingly belong together.

Almoayed later described the decision to wind Vyne down. In his account, the problem was the timing and the company’s changing priorities. He said the team was delivering and customers were still arriving. That made the decision harder: a business can be doing useful work while taking its owner away from the work it most needs to do.

He wrote about the conversations with employees and founders who had trusted Tarabut with what they had built. There is no neat victory lap in that description. It is the sort of decision that tests a founder’s ability to revise a plan after becoming personally invested in it. Buying a company provides an announcement. Changing direction requires an explanation to the people inside it.

The year the budget became the strategy

His review of 2025 was similarly direct. Markets and regulations had moved more slowly than expected. Tarabut restructured, closed operations outside its core and made difficult decisions about its team and suppliers. Almoayed reported that monthly cash burn fell by more than 80%, revenue more than doubled and the business approached break-even.

These are his reported figures, and they describe a specific year. They also complicate a familiar account of startup progress in which the next funding round supplies all the necessary punctuation. Here, the consequential work included spending less, choosing fewer priorities and keeping the organisation operating while its assumptions changed.

His stated direction for 2026 was to build products on top of the connectivity already established. Merely connecting institutions would become less distinctive over time, he argued. The commercial question was what those connections could help a bank decide or deliver. This is a founder adjusting his explanation of value as the business matures.

Credit where the shopkeeper already works

One example makes that shift concrete. In September 2025, Saudi National Bank announced plans for a point-of-sale lending service for small and medium-sized enterprises, powered by Tarabut and delivered through Geidea. The initiative was subject to the necessary Saudi Central Bank approvals. Its intended setting was the merchant’s existing payments environment.

For a shopkeeper, that setting matters. The business is already taking payments and generating evidence of how it trades. The proposed service would bring financing closer to that activity, instead of requiring the owner to start an entirely separate journey. The bank, the payments provider and Tarabut each have a role in making the process work.

In a conversation with Visa’s Leila Serhan, Almoayed described an ambition to make financial services easier to reach and to address wider economic problems. Small-business finance gives that ambition a recognisable customer. Behind the talk of platforms is an owner trying to keep a business moving, with limited enthusiasm for another form.

The institutions on the other side of the table

In January 2026, Tarabut announced the acquisition of Bahrain-founded AI engineering business Servable. The intended applications included income verification, credit assessment and compliance processes. The announcement paired those ambitions with governance, privacy and explainability. For a company serving regulated institutions, a useful decision needs to be one the institution can understand and defend.

Then, on 9 September 2026, Tarabut announced $50 million in strategic financing. The named backers included Riyad Bank, the X-Tech Fund managed by SAB Invest, GIB Saudi Arabia, Zamil Group and Kanoo Ventures. The transaction remained subject to regulatory approvals, including SAMA’s. Tarabut also reported having processed more than five billion API calls across the region.

Almoayed emphasised that the institutions backing the business were institutions running on its infrastructure. That gives the announcement a connection to his earliest problem: persuading established organisations to let a young company into consequential parts of their work. Some of those organisations were now prepared to commit capital as well.

He has moved from seeking room to test an idea to asking what a connected financial system can deliver for a business needing credit. Along the way came partnerships, an acquisition he reconsidered and a year of spending cuts. The unglamorous refrain still fits. There are people to persuade, promises to keep and a chair to pull up.