Ziina goes one-tap Pay by Bank in the UAE on 25 June with Lean’s Deposits

On 25 June, Lean Technologies and Ziina made a move that sounds small until you remember how often people fund wallets. They launched the UAE’s first One-Tap Pay by Bank experience under the Open Finance framework, letting Ziina users connect their bank account once and then top up their wallet with a single tap. No repeated credential entry. No redirect out to a bank portal.

The point is immediate and practical: pay by bank in the UAE has been live, but it was previously available only as single instant payments. With this launch, Ziina and Lean say they have demonstrated that the underlying infrastructure can support recurring, low-effort payment experiences, the kind that turn a payment method into something people actually use every day.

To understand why this matters, it helps to picture the old pattern. In most “Pay by Bank” flows, the user must effectively start a mini journey each time, even if the underlying payments rail is enabled. That friction is acceptable for occasional transfers. It is a problem when the product is wallet funding, where the action repeats frequently and the user expects the experience to feel as simple and intuitive as the best consumer apps they already use.

Here, Ziina is explicitly targeting one of the most common actions within its consumer payments product: funding the wallet. Talal Toukan, Co-Founder and Head of Engineering at Ziina, frames it that way. He argues people expect financial products to match everyday consumer technology, and then calls wallet funding a “natural next step” to reduce friction. The operational takeaway is clear: if “one-tap” works, you can increase the share of users who fund quickly, without waiting for extra steps, without leaving the experience, and without trusting multiple credential prompts.

Lean’s role is equally specific. The capability was built on Lean’s Deposits solution, combining Ziina’s consumer payment experience with Lean’s Open Finance infrastructure. The press release also positions the launch as a maturation milestone, saying the One-Tap Pay by Bank experience marks a significant step in the maturation of account-to-account payments in the region.

That framing is not just marketing language. Pay by Bank is fundamentally about account-to-account movement, which tends to sit in the middle between traditional banking rails and the user-friendly front ends fintechs want to own. Open Finance is the regulatory and framework layer that makes that bridging easier to standardize. Once you have an approved way to connect and initiate account-to-account payments, you still have to design the user journey. The difference between “it works” and “people use it” is the number of taps, redirects, and repeated credential steps.

Omar Hamada, VP of Sales at Lean, nails the strategic distinction in the statement included with the announcement. He says Pay by Bank has been live in the UAE for some time, but until now it had only been available as single instant payments. Working with Ziina, Lean says it has shown that the infrastructure is capable of supporting recurring, low-effort payment experiences, the kind that make a payment method part of how people pay every day. That is effectively a bet on a shift in product design, not just payments plumbing.

The “second-order” implication for executives is that once you remove repeated friction, you change what boards and growth teams will measure. The launch is positioned as a move beyond one-time transactions toward recurring usage, and the press release explicitly says the focus now shifts to building the recurring, low-friction experiences that drive everyday usage. In practice, that usually means product teams start thinking less about isolated conversion and more about repeat behaviors: the frequency of wallet funding, the share of top-ups completed without intervention, and the ability to scale onboarding and funding with minimal drop-off.

There is also an industry signaling effect. The announcement was made at Pay by Bank: The Default Way to Pay, Lean’s flagship industry event. The event brought together more than 150 leaders from across banking, fintech, commerce, and regulation to discuss the future of account-to-account payments in the UAE and wider region. In other words, this is not happening in a corner. Lean is broadcasting that the “default way to pay” vision can move from an idea to a repeatable user experience that other partners can adopt or benchmark.

For decision-makers at fintechs and payments companies, this raises the bar. If one provider can credibly support one-tap recurring funding under an Open Finance framework, the market expectation shifts. Users will judge by experience, not by what the regulation enables. And if competitors still require redirects or repeated credential entry for recurring wallet actions, those products will start to feel heavy. For banks and payment infrastructure providers, it also reinforces the direction: with infrastructure and regulation live, the differentiator becomes the user experience layer, how quickly users can complete their most common transactions, and how reliably the flow supports repeat usage.

Bottom line: Lean and Ziina are betting that the future of account-to-account payments is not just interoperability. It is habit formation. One-tap wallet top-ups are the kind of change that can compound over time, because every reduction in friction makes the “next payment” easier than the last. If this scales across partners, it could turn Pay by Bank from a feature into default behavior across the UAE’s digital payments ecosystem.