Issuer, acquirer, payment scheme, customer or merchant. Every card payment has been built around those four parties. AI agents add a fifth.

Dr. Samer Soliman, Group Chief Executive Officer of Arab Financial Services (AFS), the payments processor serving more than 60 banks across 20 markets, joins Nameer Khan, Chairman of the MENA Fintech Association, on Capital Markets: Wall Street to MENA.

On where regional payments are heading, he is clear that the shift from cash to digital is already the norm. Consumers expect to pay and accept payments by phone, and the region’s young population keeps adoption moving faster than anywhere else.

On AFS’s role, he explains that the company sits between acceptance and payments. It plans to expand across the value chain, introducing AI agents that help banks process payments and AI-driven identity commerce that helps merchants complete more transactions.

On the rails themselves, he sets out three rules the industry has to rewrite. First, what limits banks will set for agents and what customers can delegate to them. Second, how agents are identified: each through a token, and never with a customer’s card details. Third, what happens with chargebacks.

On fraud, his starting point is that payments is a trust business. Systems will have to defend against attacks from agents, which may mean one agent combating fraud from another.

Asked whether the Gulf can write these rules before the West, his answer is 100%. AFS has proven the model in the UAE, Bahrain and Egypt and is now working on Oman.

Topics discussed: the future of payments in the Middle East and Africa, agentic commerce, AI agents in the payments value chain, tokenised agent identity, chargebacks and acceptance rules, fraud prevention in an agentic world, the Gulf’s role in setting global payments rules.

Guest: Dr. Samer Soliman, Group Chief Executive Officer, Arab Financial Services
Host: Nameer Khan, Chairman, MENA Fintech Association