GCC Is Not One Market, with Omar El Gammal, Paymob

Why treating the GCC as one market is the first mistake founders make: #

Omar El Gammal, EVP of Global Business Development at Paymob, has launched payment products across four GCC markets and holds licenses across the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Oman, where Paymob became the first international fintech fully licensed by the Central Bank of Oman. His starting point for this conversation: the GCC isn’t a market, it’s a set of distinct markets, each with its own dialect, population makeup, and regulatory framework.

UAE and Saudi Arabia require genuinely different playbooks: #

Omar breaks down the practical differences: the UAE’s diverse population rewards hiring and go-to-market strategies built around matching merchant nationalities and languages, while Saudi Arabia’s more locally concentrated market typically demands greater funding given its regulatory scale. A strategy built for one doesn’t transfer cleanly to the other.

The shortcut founders keep missing: skip the consultant, go find out yourself: #

Omar’s sharpest advice is also his most practical: don’t let a consultant sit between you and the market. Running interviews with potential local hires does double duty as recruiting and market research, and building a compliant MVP, a PSP model under a bank’s sponsorship, for instance, teaches founders more about local regulation than a year spent building a licensing file in the abstract.

Regulators want the same thing founders do: #

Paymob’s central bank relationships directly shaped their roadmap, steering the company toward digitizing rent and education payments, both of which now contribute meaningfully to revenue. Omar’s broader argument: regulators have visibility into market needs that new entrants don’t, and genuine alignment with their goals speeds up both licensing and growth.

What’s coming next for GCC fintech: #

Omar points founders toward open finance, crypto and payment tokens, and pay-by-bank (particularly for B2B payments) as the technologies to watch over the next 18 to 24 months, alongside continued regulatory evolution around BNPL as adoption accelerates.

Why listen: #

For any founder or investor evaluating GCC expansion, this episode is a direct corrective to the “enter the GCC” pitch deck slide, replacing it with a concrete playbook: which market to prioritize based on your product, how to build regulatory relationships from day one, and where the region’s next fintech waves are actually forming.