aspg-37-4442-1792226216 20261017083656 American Scientific Publishing Group admin@americaspg.com American Scientific Publishing Group Financial Technology and Innovation FinTechI 2836-5372 2026 6 1 Rhada Boujlil College of Business, Prince Sultan University, Saudi Arabia Saad Alsunbul College of Business, Prince Sultan University, Saudi Arabia 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. 2026 25 34 4442 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 10.54216/FinTech-I.060104 https://americaspg.com/journal/37/article/4442 https://americaspg.com/storage/articles/manuscripts/01KXPYCTBGRF6G9GFJQ9YJKJSM.pdf