At Bahrain’s third annual Fintech Forward, fintech’s grown-up era was clear: align with regulators, team with banks, ship things people use.
Held on 8 to 9 October at Exhibition World Bahrain, Fintech Forward 2025 is the Kingdom’s flagship fintech forum, hosted by Bahrain EDB (the investment promotion agency) with Bahrain FinTech Bay (the national fintech hub) and strong support from the Central Bank of Bahrain (CBB).
Now in its third edition, FF25 drew almost 2,000 attendees, 40-plus speakers and a record 38 MoUs/strategic agreements. The UK Department for Business & Trade brought its largest-ever delegation – 70 delegates from 36 fintechs – as the event leaned into its theme, ‘The Era of Integration: The Maturing Age of Fintech’.
What was on the table? Integration everywhere: instant payments moving into everyday use; the CBB’s push into supervisory technology (suptech); digital assets as practical rails (stablecoins, custody, tokenisation); interoperability across borders; open banking and Islamic finance; and inclusion with measurable outcomes.
On the agenda
First up, the event addressed the state of global fintech. Host Joshua Roberts, capital markets editor at The Economist – the event programmer, framed the mood: durability over grow-at-all-costs expansion.
Simon French, MD, chief economist and head of research at UK investment bank Panmure Liberum, explained why capital deployment is adjusting “to a very, very different global cost of capital environment”, noting that funding terms from the near-zero-rate era won’t fly when “the global cost of capital is four, five per cent,” and that a “huge battle for skills” with, “pre-existing compensation packages” limiting mobility, has left “something of a static ecosystem”.
Next, H.E. Noor bint Ali Alkhulaif, Minister of Sustainable Development and chief executive of Bahrain EDB, brought that global picture down to ground level.
If French described the squeeze, she described how Bahrain is growing through it: steady, diversified and deliberately collaborative. Financial services now make up the largest slice of GDP, and, as she put it, Bahrain’s advantage is its scale – small enough for decisions to move fast, big enough to matter.
The approach is partnership-first: regulator, banks, academia and global firms at one table, focused on building skills and keeping the ecosystem open for business. She explained: “when you’re faced with challenges, the best thing to do is to innovate… and in Bahrain it’s innovation that is partnered.”
Digital assets, minus the drama
From there we shifted to crypto as plumbing, not spectacle. On stage: Revolut, Ripple, the UK government and National Bank of Bahrain (NBB). The thread was institutional and practical – custody, settlement, payouts – rather than slogan-y.
Usman Ahmed, group chief executive at National Bank of Bahrain, revealed that the bank is “going to announce… the adoption of a blockchain-based solution that allows us to do more programmable liquidity management” alongside programmable payments that don’t care about cut-off times.
Reece Merrick, MD Middle East and Africa at Ripple, noted how fast sentiment has turned in boardrooms – “in the last couple of years, it’s completely flipped” – while Katie Ramsey, head of fintech at the UK Department for Business and Trade (DBT) kept the trust recipe simple: “clarity, not hype. Clarity is what will drive that trust.”
The regulator’s playbook
In a one-to-one, H.E. Khalid Humaidan (Governor, CBB) said the future of finance will be “a digital future” and regulators have to keep pace. He suggested that Bahrain is “leading the world when it comes to instant payments,” averaging about 25 per person per month in the first half of 2025.
Beyond payments, the bank is overhauling supervision: phase one (this year) opens raw-data feeds from licensees; phase two automates ratio and rules checks; phase three uses the dataset to forecast risks – suptech in practice.
On authorisations he stuck to first principles – compliance, governance, consumer protection and systemic risk – because “when we focus on the most important risks, we can say yes to almost everything else”.
Inclusion, measured… not just marketed
In a panel on building a sustainable fintech ecosystem, the talk focused on outcomes over optics.
Cynthia Wandia, co-founder and CEO at Kwara, said retention only counts if users return for things that tangibly help eg higher credit scores, more women borrowing, value chains actually funded.
Durreen Shahnaz, founder and CEO of Impact Investment Exchange, highlighted how measuring last-mile impact and baking it into products can lower portfolio risk. While Mathias Wikström, CEO at Doconomy, argued inclusion should come with climate literacy – score everyday transactions so people see cause and effect.
And Gerrit Sindermann, executive director of Green Digital Finance Alliance, pointed to regulation plus data rails that can steer real capital into greener corporate and infrastructure projects.
Crypto in transition
Changpeng Zhao (CZ), the former Binance chief, stayed practical in his keynote interview. His biggest lesson from the scrutiny era? “Always, always respect the government, especially the US government”… and work closely with regulators.
On payments infrastructure, he suggested that whether you’re talking stablecoins or CBDCs, the name isn’t the point: “the label matters much less… the ease of use, the fee of transfers, the convenience and the freedom is really important”. He also argued on-chain activity is easier to police than cash and expects stablecoins and CBDCs to live side by side.
Looking ahead, he said “AI is going to drive crypto like crazy… a million times more transactions for everyone in the world.” In his view, AI-native agents won’t use cards; they’ll transact on blockchains, pushing crypto deeper into everyday financial plumbing.
Lessons from Shazam
Dhiraj Mukherjee, co-founder of Shazam and now a tech-for-good investor, shared hard-won tips for fintechs from his music recognition journey as well as his investor seat.
Start useful. Shazam launched before the App Store; “we had to invent the technology from scratch”. Its real moat turned out to be data, spotting tracks before radio did. The fintech tip: build something people actually need, then let the data compound.
Partner smart. Have empathy for incumbents with brands and regulators to answer to. Don’t try to run through the wall; work with the rules and bring people with you.
Stay adaptable. Solve a real customer pain, but expect to change course. “Technology evolves all the time… what matters is being fluid – able to adapt to the pace of change.”
And look ahead. “AI is the operating system of this decade.”
Bahrain-UK in action
To close Fintech Forward 2025 out, Bahrain EDB, Bahrain FinTech Bay and the UK’s DBT ran a joint Bahrain-UK session on the main stage. H.E. Noor bint Ali Alkhulaif, CBB governor H.E. Khalid Humaidan, British ambassador Alastair Long, and DBT’s Ramsey – rocking impressive Bahrain inspired red-and-white nails – did the welcomes.
In short: pro-partnership, get-stuff-done.
The UK delegation was big by any measure: 36 fintechs across identity, open banking, AML, wealth tech and data, such as Raidiam, Velexa, MonetaGo, Umazi, Sumsub, Finbridge Global, Sensfish, Savea and more.
Umazi formally launched in Bahrain (digital identity/KYC), while Velexa and Ajyad unveiled a wealth-tech tie-up. AMAN, powered by Themis, launched the AMAN AI Investigator – part of a national rollout to help protect the Kingdom against international and transnational crime and money laundering.
As Ambassador Long said, the aim is “a shared future of innovation, sustainability and trust”.
A flavour of Bahrain
There wasn’t just panels and pitch decks at Fintech Forward 2025. The Exhibition World Bahrain floor had queues for Mohammed Redha, a classical Arabic calligrapher and lettering artist taking on-the-spot commissions.
A few steps away, a craftsman was weaving baskets from palm leaves – Bahrain’s traditional khous work – while DANAT (the Bahrain Institute for Pearls and Gemstones) ran live oyster-shucking demos.
Visitors picked three oysters, watched the experts open them, and, if luck struck, took home a Bahraini pearl. Our haul? A thimble of pearl glitter!
On the fintech side of the hall: stands from the likes of stc pay, Visa, BENEFIT and Flooss were kept busy during networking breaks.
Also announced at FF2025
The event served up some headline news, too.
Bahrain revealed it had successfully piloted Google Cloud’s Universal Ledger (GCUL) ahead of the event. Coordinated by Bahrain FinTech Bay with BENEFIT, NBB, Bahrain Islamic Bank (BISB), Bank of Bahrain and Kuwait (BBK), the controlled test settled high-value BHD payments instantly using tokenised commercial bank money.
“We proved you can do cross-border-grade payments instantly at a fraction of the cost,” Bahrain FinTech Bay CEO Bader Sater told The Fintech Times, adding that Bahrain will “keep playing first-adopter and test-bed” to bring big-tech rails into production.
Ripple expanded its footprint via a new partnership with Bahrain FinTech Bay to support the development of proofs-of-concept and pilot projects relevant to Bahrain’s fintech ecosystem; showcasing solutions across areas such as blockchain technology, cross-border payments, digital assets, stablecoins and tokenisation.
It also lays a clearer path, as Merrick says, for Ripple to offer its “digital assets custody solution and stablecoin Ripple USD (RLUSD) to Bahrain’s financial institutions”.
As Fintech Forward 2025 wrapped, H.E. Noor bint Ali Alkhulaif gave a 2026 teaser: “Next year, we will make it bigger!”
The post Inside Bahrain’s Fintech Forward 2025: Integration Over Hype appeared first on The Fintech Times.
