Scaling Trustworthy Digital Finance in Asia and the Middle East:

A Regional Evidence Review and Institutional Readiness

Framework

Rhada Boujlil1,* Saad Alsunbul1

1 College of Business, Prince Sultan University, Saudi Arabia

Received: December 19, 2025 Revised: February 16, 2026 Accepted: May 12, 2026 ⋆ Corresponding author

ABSTRACT

Digital finance has made significant progress in Asia and the Middle East, but it is not one-size-fits-all in terms of

performance in inclusion, productivity, or stability. The key limitation is now institutional, not technical: Payment

rails, data-sharing structures, regulatory capability, market capacity, and protections need to be built up in lockstep.

This article summarizes 34 peer-reviewed papers from 2020 to 2025 and sets up an institutional-readiness framework

for trustworthy digital finance for the region. The synthesis brings together elements of structured evidence coding,

comparative evidence analysis of East and Southeast Asian evidence, evidence from the Gulf Cooperation Council

and broader Middle East, and cross-regional emerging-market evidence analysis. Five interdependent pillars emerge:

digital public infrastructure; data governance and interoperability; adaptive regulation; market capability and

inclusive adoption; and resilience with consumer protection. The evidence from Asia is more extensive with regard to

outcomes at the household- and firm-level, platform-enabled inclusion, and digital infrastructure, whereas evidence

from the Middle East is more focused on outcomes related to platform adoption by regulators, bank performance,

and governance conditions. In both regions, positive results are undermined by asymmetric data access, weak

markets, low consumer capability, and low innovation coupled with the lack of post-deployment supervisions. The

article suggests an order of implementation for both national and cross-border initiatives, identifies the research

gaps and proposes a research agenda for ASEAN-GCC digital-finance corridors. A core message is that trustworthy

scale relies on institutional complementarity – innovation’s developmentally valuable only if it is supported by

development of infrastructure, rules, capabilities and safeguards.

Keywords: Digital finance FinTech Financial inclusion Regulatory sandbox Digital public infrastructure Asia

Middle East GCC Financial stability Institutional readiness

1. INTRODUCTION

The locus of financial innovation has shifted. Regulatory

sandboxes, instant-payment systems, digital banks and openfinance

programs are driving structural changes in economies

across the Gulf and wider Middle East, meanwhile several of

the world’s largest markets for digital payments and platformfinance

are found in Asia. These paths have been referred to

as technology adoption stories. That interpretation does not

fully convey the meaning. Different technologies produce

different results as a result of being introduced to different

institutional systems.

If the factors of identity, connectivity, merchant acceptance

and redress mechanism are already in place, a payment ap-