When siblings Faisal, Sarah and Talal Toukan founded Ziina in 2020, the problem they wanted to solve was deceptively simple: moving money between people in the Arab world remained unnecessarily complicated.
Six years later, Ziina has evolved from a social peer-to-peer payments application into one of the UAE's most interesting consumer and SME fintech platforms.
Led by Co-Founder and CEO Faisal Toukan, the Y Combinator-backed company has steadily expanded the ways individuals and businesses can move and accept money. Businesses can receive payments through links, QR codes, Tap to Pay and online checkout, while users can transfer funds through the Ziina ecosystem without navigating traditional account-number-driven processes.
The company's regulatory progress has been equally important. Ziina operates as a licensed financial institution in the UAE through its Stored Value Facility authorisation, giving it a foundation on which to expand beyond its initial payments offering.
One of its most consequential milestones arrived in 2026 through its partnership with Lean Technologies.
Together, Ziina and Lean delivered what they described as the UAE's first live customer-initiated Open Finance payment under the Central Bank's Open Finance framework. Users were able to initiate account-to-account payments from their bank within the Ziina experience, using regulated APIs rather than traditional card rails or manual bank transfers.
That development points towards a much larger shift in payments.
Open Finance could enable fintech applications to connect directly to regulated bank infrastructure, allowing money to move more quickly and potentially at lower cost while giving consumers greater control over financial-data permissions.
Ziina is well positioned to benefit because its proposition has always centred on removing friction from money movement.
Its growing focus on businesses is equally important. SMEs, freelancers and entrepreneurs often encounter disproportionate complexity when collecting payments, reconciling transactions and managing cash flow. Ziina is increasingly designing its platform around these users as well as consumers.
Toukan's vision is ultimately larger than creating another wallet. Ziina describes its mission in terms of financial freedom for the Arab world.
By combining approachable consumer design, business-payment tools and regulated Open Finance connectivity, Ziina is becoming an important example of how homegrown fintech can redesign financial experiences around the habits and expectations of a new generation.