Money20/20 Middle East 2026: Paymentology's Jeff Parker on Why the Future of Payments Is Built on Infrastructure

Quick Summary

A year on from his last visit to Riyadh, Paymentology CEO Jeff Parker reports three new clients signed in the region, a move onto GCP as its regional cloud provider and a new country manager on the ground from October. Speaking at Money20/20 Middle East 2026, he explains why the company calls this its most strategic region in the world, what its $175 million raise will fund, and why he believes the real innovation in payments will now come from infrastructure.

What has changed for Paymentology in the Middle East over the past year?

"Time goes quickly, doesn't it? It's a year already," says Jeff Parker, CEO of Paymentology. In that year the company has:

• Continued to grow its existing clients in the region
• Signed three new clients, with two expected to be live before the end of the year
• Rebuilt much of its infrastructure, and is now live with GCP as its cloud provider in the region
• Hired a new country manager, starting in October, as the base for building out a local team

Where are the biggest opportunities in Saudi Arabia and the wider region?

Parker describes a very growth-orientated environment. The standout opportunity is the region's sophisticated, educated young population, which increasingly demands great digital products and experiences. Delivering those, he argues, depends on cloud-based infrastructure that offers flexibility, scalability and configurability, and that opportunity will only grow as AI accelerates.

Why was now the right time for Paymentology's $175 million raise?

Parker calls the raise a reinforcement of the business Paymentology has built. He points to a shift in the market: traditional players are now seeing the customer experience and scale that digital banks and challengers have achieved. After five years of focus on the front end and the mobile app, he says, the industry is realising that long-term innovation will be driven by infrastructure. Paymentology's answer is a cloud-based, highly configurable platform on a single code base across the entire world.

The company was growing quickly even before the raise. It became profitable in 2024, then chose to go unprofitable in 2025 to accelerate growth because the opportunity was big enough. In the Middle East, UAE and Saudi are its fastest-growing markets, and the investment will support:

• The regional GCP infrastructure
• Continued product development
• Meeting stringent local regulatory requirements in Saudi Arabia, the UAE and across the GCC
• Hiring local talent who understand the culture, the market and the language

What is Lume, and why did Paymentology build it?

Parker argues that issuer processing has lagged behind in innovation. While acquiring has seen huge investment over the last 10 to 15 years from the likes of Stripe, Adyen and Block, he says issuer processing is "10 years behind that". Paymentology built Lume, a cloud-native, configurable and scalable platform, to close that gap. It has already let the company add a credit product on top of its debit offering and move quickly on digital and mobile experiences. "If you don't have a modern foundation and a modern infrastructure, you're on your path to becoming legacy," he says.

Technology is only part of the job, Parker adds. Delivering world-class propositions also means meeting regulatory requirements and customer expectations, and giving clients the tools and data to build unique propositions on top of the platform.

How will AI and agentic commerce change banking in the region?

Parker is wary of predicting the pace of AI, noting that a year ago nobody could have foreseen the current pace of change. What he is confident about is demand: a very large young population that wants money to move instantly and finance embedded in the services they already use. He believes AI and agentic commerce will accelerate that embedded finance model, and in his personal view loyalty will shift from banks towards brands, with banks playing a less frontline but still critical role in supporting those brands.

What is next for Paymentology in the Middle East?

Parker lists the priorities for the next couple of years: meeting client expectations with a robust, scalable platform, building new product including tokenisation, its newly launched credit proposition and fraud capabilities, and continuing to localise through regulation and a team on the ground.

FF NEWS TAKE:

Parker's line that issuer processing is a decade behind acquiring is the most quotable thing here, and the most commercially pointed. The front-end race between digital banks is well documented; the less visible contest is over who owns the processing layer underneath. Pairing a single global code base with local hiring, local cloud and local regulation is Paymentology's bet that infrastructure players can be global and local at the same time, and the Gulf, with its young, digital-first customers, is where it is testing that hardest.