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Welcome to Xchange by Money20/20 Middle East – where money meets ideas 

Bold thought:

The strongest identity check in a payment is often the one you never see.

For years, proving you are ‘you’ online meant friction – OTPs, selfies, document scans, and countless re-verifications. But we’re moving towards a different kind of digital trust. Instead of depending on something the user does, it’s something the system infers. 

It became clear to us at Money20/20 Middle East 2025 that identity is becoming a continuous, adaptive layer that moves with the user, not against them.

Snapshot

Every digital payment triggers a set of passive trust signals in the background: device attributes, network patterns, transaction history, behavioural clues, merchant reputation and (in some markets) telco data points that help confirm SIM stability. 

These checks don’t require the user to lift a finger, but they often provide a stronger sense of who is acting than a standalone credential.

This change is happening because traditional, explicit verification simply can’t match the speed and scale of today’s payment volumes. Global payment systems are moving toward risk-based and adaptive authentication, allowing low-risk transactions to flow, while stepping up checks only when behaviour actually looks unusual.

And the Middle East is very much part of this evolution. Banks, payment networks and digital wallets across the region are layering in richer fraud detection tools and behavioural models. These complement high-assurance national digital identity systems such as UAE Pass and Saudi Arabia’s Nafath. The high-trust onboarding those systems enable is powerful, but it’s the everyday transactions where ambient identity really earns its keep.

And most of the time, the user never notices. That’s the point. 

Voices

Fraud/identity expert:

“Without complete, transparent and real-time actionable behavioural data to accurately authenticate users, banks can be left with a partial view of their customers, leading to false positives, friction in the customer experience and inadequate fraud prevention decisions.” – Serpil Hall (Head of Financial Crime, Celebrus), in The Fintech Times. 

Identity platform:

“We believe that everybody on Earth should be able to sign up for a bank account, sign up for a FinTech account, do a wire of hundreds of thousands of dollars, each as seamlessly as it is to make a phone call.” – Brad Rosenfeld (CMO at Prove Identity), in an interview with PYMNTS. 

What to watch and do

• Watch: Behavioural biometrics becoming standard in digital banking and wallets – intended to reduce false declines, not increase surveillance.
• Watch: AI-driven fraud models improving accuracy – and facing bigger questions about transparency and fairness.
• Do: Design contextually. Not all users have the same device, data plan or bandwidth. Build for the realities of migrant workers, gig workers and low-end devices.

Further reading…

• Progress in identification: 3 findings from the latest data – World Bank, 2024
• The Global Findex – World Bank, 2025
• Unified national access contributes to unprecedented digital transformation in the Kingdom – Saudi Press Agency, 2024

A question for fintechs…

If you could remove one step from your customer authentication flow tomorrow – without increasing fraud – what would it be? 

Open this newsletter on LinkedIn and tell us in the comments. We’ll see you there. 

Catch you next week,

The Money20/20 Middle East Team