Decades Of Currency Stability. Sudden Collapse, In The Middle East.

Part 6 of an 8-part series on beneficiary needs and preferences, region by region: the Middle East

Saudi Arabia's currency has been pegged to the dollar since 1986. Lebanon's banking system evaporated in a matter of months. Both are the Middle East.

This is Part 6 of our Regional Payments Series. No other region in this series holds this much contrast within its own borders — a mix of some of the most stable currency conditions and advanced payment infrastructure in the world sitting alongside some of the most fragile and fastest-changing compliance environments anywhere.

What's Required Across The Middle East

The Middle East's "needs" side isn't about a single missing piece of infrastructure. It's about a range of conditions wide enough that no single assumption holds across the region.

• Sanctions and compliance status: this varies sharply by country and can shift in either direction faster than most compliance calendars account for. Syria spent over a decade on the US Treasury's sanctions list before being fully delisted: OFAC removed Syrian financial institutions, including the Central Bank of Syria, from its Specially Designated Nationals list effective July 1, 2025, and a subsequent executive order in June 2026 revoked the underlying Syria Sanctions Program entirely. The EU followed with its own sectoral sanctions relief on energy, transport, and banking. Correspondent banking relationships that were simply unavailable a year earlier are now actively reopening.

• Correspondent banking fragility: sophisticated infrastructure isn't a permanent guarantee. Lebanon's banking system, long a genuine financial hub for the wider region, has been in collapse since October 2019 — described by the World Bank as one of the worst economic crises globally since the mid-19th century. The fallout wasn't contained to Lebanon: Yemeni banks alone had roughly $240 million in foreign currency deposits trapped in Lebanese banks as of 2019, and Iraqi and Syrian deposits were caught the same way, since regional banks and businesses had used Lebanon's dollar-friendly banking system as a hub for years.

• Extreme infrastructure range: this is the widest spread of any region in this series. The UAE runs one of the most advanced instant payment systems in the world (see below), while other countries in the same region are still working to rebuild basic correspondent banking access after years of conflict or sanctions. Treating "the Middle East" as one infrastructure environment means being wrong about most of the countries in it.

What's Actually Preferred Across The Middle East

The Gulf specifically inverts this series' usual currency story. Where LATAM and Africa deal with depreciating currencies and Europe deals with a single shared framework, the GCC offers something almost unique in this series: multi-decade currency certainty by design.

• Currency certainty: five of the six Gulf Cooperation Council currencies have been hard-pegged to the US dollar for decades. The Saudi riyal has held near 3.75 SAR per USD since a managed devaluation completed in 1986. The UAE dirham has held near 3.6725 AED per USD since the early 1980s, officially confirmed in 2002. The Qatari riyal, Bahraini dinar, and Omani rial all follow similar long-standing pegs. The sixth, the Kuwaiti dinar, shifted to an undisclosed currency basket in 2007 — but that basket is still estimated at 70-80% dollar-weighted. For a series that has spent five parts on currency volatility, the Gulf is the clearest exception.

• Instant, phone-based payments: the UAE's Aani platform, operated by Al Etihad Payments on behalf of the Central Bank of the UAE, launched in October 2023 and has grown to roughly 12.5 million users, settling domestic dirham transfers in about three seconds using only a phone number, email address, or QR code — no IBAN required. It currently covers domestic peer-to-peer transfers, with international remittance features and a UAE-India payment system connection reportedly in development. Roughly a quarter of UAE consumer transactions still happen in cash, per a 2026 Visa survey, so the shift isn't complete even in one of the region's most digitized markets.

• Currency escape via stablecoins: where the region's currencies aren't pegged and stable, the pattern already seen in LATAM and Africa shows up again, sharply. Lebanon is a case study the Bank for International Settlements and OMFIF have both studied directly: since the 2019 banking collapse, the lira has devalued by roughly 98%, and bank deposits — nicknamed "lollars" — are nominally dollar-denominated but worth a fraction of face value if a depositor can withdraw them at all. USDT became a genuine dollar substitute for ordinary Lebanese trying to preserve value outside a banking system nobody trusts anymore. Turkey shows an even larger version of the same pattern: the lira hit a historic low of 41 to the dollar in March 2025, losing more than half its value in twelve months, and USDT/lira was Binance's single highest-volume trading pair in 2024 at roughly $22 billion. Turkey now ranks third globally in crypto adoption, with 52% of adults aged 18-60 having invested in cryptocurrency. This is worth clearly separating from stablecoin activity in the wealthy Gulf states, where activity is real (dollar-pegged tokens make up an estimated 30% of UAE crypto volume) but driven mostly by investment and trading rather than currency escape — the dirham doesn't need escaping, since it's already pegged to the dollar. Same technology, two very different underlying reasons.

• Provider landscape: Wise, Payoneer, and Airwallex all reach the Gulf reasonably well, consistent with the region's high banking sophistication and wealth. MENA's own major payment platforms — PayTabs (MENA's largest payment orchestration platform by some measures, active across 10+ countries), Network International (Dubai-based, operating across 50+ markets after merging with Magnati), and Tap Payments — are worth knowing about, but they're built primarily for merchants accepting payments, not for companies paying beneficiaries out, the same acceptance-versus-payout distinction that showed up with Adyen in LATAM and UnionPay in APAC.

The Takeaway

Nowhere else in this series holds this much contrast in a single region. The Gulf offers some of the most predictable currency conditions and advanced instant-payment infrastructure anywhere in the world. Elsewhere in the same region, a banking system that took decades to build can unravel in months, and sanctions status can flip in either direction faster than most companies update their compliance assumptions. "The Middle East" isn't a useful planning unit on its own — which specific country, and which version of that country's current situation, is the only question that actually matters.

Do you know which version of the Middle East your beneficiaries are actually in?