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The Central Bank of the UAE has completed Project Aperta, an international initiative led by the Bank for International Settlements to enable secure and interoperable cross-border open finance. The announcement was made on June 17, 2026, and it marks one of the most consequential milestones in the UAE’s open finance journey since the mandatory open finance regulation came into force in 2024.
Project Aperta CBUAE is not a bilateral agreement or a pilot memorandum. It is a working prototype — tested across five economies, validated through two real-world use cases, and now released as open-source infrastructure that any jurisdiction in the world can adopt and build upon.
For UAE fintechs, SMEs engaged in cross-border trade, and financial institutions operating across multiple jurisdictions, the completion of Project Aperta has practical implications that go well beyond the headline.
Editor’s Take: Project Aperta CBUAE answers a question that has been unresolved since open finance became a global regulatory priority: how do you connect 70 different domestic frameworks without forcing any of them to change? The neutral interoperability layer model is the answer, and the UAE helped build and validate it at the highest level. For UAE SMEs engaged in international trade, the immediate practical benefits are reduced duplication, faster onboarding, and lower compliance costs when accessing financial services in participating markets. The longer-term significance is that the UAE’s open finance infrastructure is now designed to connect globally, not just operate domestically.
What Is CBUAE’s Project Aperta – and What Was the Problem It Was Solving?
Around 70 jurisdictions currently regulate open finance through various approaches, with open banking as a subset. These open finance ecosystems often operate with differing domestic standards and protocols, preventing the smooth flow of data across borders.
In plain terms, the UAE built a domestic open finance infrastructure, the Al Tareq platform, mandatory participation for all CBUAE-supervised institutions, and standardised APIs. So did Hong Kong. So did Brazil. So did the UK. But none of those systems could talk to each other. Each country’s open finance ecosystem was an island.
Some jurisdictions had begun addressing cross-border data portability through bilateral arrangements, but this risked causing fragmentation in scope, standards and solutions. This fragmentation reduces interoperability and scalability while increasing overall complexity.
Project Aperta was designed to bridge that gap, exploring how to reduce frictions and costs in global finance by enabling seamless cross-border data portability through connecting the domestic open finance infrastructures of different jurisdictions.
The name itself is instructive. Aperta is Latin for open, a deliberate signal about the project’s founding philosophy.
Who Built It and With Whom
Project Aperta was developed in collaboration with the BIS Innovation Hub Hong Kong Centre, the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, the Central Bank of Brazil, and the Financial Conduct Authority of the United Kingdom, together with the participation of the Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation, the International Chamber of Commerce Digital Standards Initiative, and the Hong Kong University Standard Chartered Foundation FinTech Academy.
The participant list is worth examining carefully. This is not a regional initiative or an emerging market pilot. The FCA governs one of the world’s most sophisticated financial markets. The HKMA oversees Asia’s premier financial centre. The Central Bank of Brazil operates one of the world’s most advanced open banking ecosystems, Pix, Brazil’s instant payment system, which processed over 60 billion transactions in 2024 alone.
The UAE’s inclusion alongside these institutions is a signal of peer-level credibility, not an observer role, but a co-architect of the infrastructure being built.
What Project Aperta Actually Built
The project demonstrated how domestic open finance networks can be connected through a neutral interoperability layer without altering national frameworks.
That last clause is the critical engineering achievement. Every participating jurisdiction maintained its own regulatory framework, data sovereignty requirements, and supervisory oversight. Project Aperta did not ask any country to change its domestic rules. It built a layer above those rules that allows verified data to flow securely between them.
Two use cases were tested and validated across the five participating economies:
| Use Case 1: Cross-Border Data Portability | Use Case 2: Trade Finance Lifecycle Management |
| Enabling faster business onboarding and reducing manual checks through secure sharing of verified business information across borders. A UAE SME applying for trade finance in Hong Kong, for example, could share its verified business data, already held and verified within the UAE’s open finance infrastructure, without submitting the same documents from scratch. | Showing how structured digital data can streamline trade finance processes from contract issuance to final settlement, addressing the excessive manual paperwork and lack of digital data portability that make trade finance processes inefficient and costly. |
Key Features of the Project Aperta Framework
| Feature | Detail |
|---|---|
| Architecture | Neutral interoperability layer connecting domestic open finance networks |
| Participating economies | UAE, Hong Kong, Brazil, UK, plus academic and standards bodies |
| Use cases tested | Cross-border data portability and trade finance lifecycle management |
| National framework impact | None — domestic rules, security requirements, and oversight fully preserved |
| Availability | All blueprints, protocols, and code released as open-source public goods |
| Primary beneficiaries | SMEs in international trade, financial institutions, regulators |
What Has Been Released as Open-Source
This is the detail that most news coverage has missed entirely.
All architectural blueprints, translation protocols, trust framework designs, reference code, and data models developed under Project Aperta have been released as open, reusable public goods, enabling other jurisdictions to adopt and build upon the work.
This is not a proprietary system that requires licensing or bilateral negotiation to access. Any central bank, financial regulator, or jurisdiction that wants to connect its domestic open finance infrastructure to the Aperta interoperability layer can download the blueprints, study the reference code, and build on what the CBUAE and its partners have already validated.
The practical consequence: Project Aperta has the potential to scale from five participating economies to dozens, without requiring each new participant to rebuild the work from scratch.
Where Project Aperta Sits Within the UAE’s Broader Open Finance Strategy
This also positions the UAE’s Al Tareq platform as internationally interoperable, not just a domestic data-sharing framework but a node in an emerging global open finance network.
Project Aperta is not a standalone initiative. It is the international dimension of a domestic open finance strategy that the CBUAE has been building since 2024.
The CBUAE joined Project Aperta in October 2024, shortly after publishing its mandatory open finance regulation, one of the most ambitious open finance implementations globally, which requires participation from all CBUAE-supervised institutions via the Al Tareq API platform.
The sequencing is deliberate. Build the domestic open finance infrastructure first, mandatory participation, standardised APIs, and the Nebras data network. Then connect it internationally through a neutral interoperability layer. Project Aperta is step two of that strategy, completed on schedule.
What This Means for UAE Fintechs and SMEs
For fintechs building on the UAE’s open finance infrastructure
The completion of Project Aperta means the Al Tareq platform, and the data flowing through it, is now architecturally ready for cross-border interoperability. Products that leverage verified UAE business data for cross-border onboarding, trade finance, and KYC processes have a validated technical pathway to export that value internationally.
For UAE SMEs engaged in international trade
The initial use case for Project Aperta was specifically trade finance for SMEs, the businesses that face the highest proportional cost from manual paperwork, duplicated onboarding, and incompatible data formats when accessing financial products across borders. The prototype demonstrated that these costs can be reduced through secure, structured data sharing across open finance networks.
For financial institutions
Cross-border KYC and onboarding are among the most expensive compliance processes in international financial services. A verified, interoperable data portability layer reduces the cost and time of these processes, particularly for institutions operating across the UAE, UK, Hong Kong, and Brazil simultaneously.
For regulators and policymakers
The open-source release of all Project Aperta blueprints and code enables other jurisdictions to adopt the framework, expanding the interoperability layer’s network effect with each new participant. The UAE is now a co-architect of global open finance infrastructure, not merely a participant in someone else’s framework.
Way Ahead
The domestic infrastructure, Al Tareq, mandatory participation, standardised APIs, was always designed to be a foundation. With Project Aperta CBUAE complete and its blueprints available to any jurisdiction that wants to build on them, that foundation now has a global reach. The next question is not whether more countries will connect to this network. It is how quickly.
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