FinTech growth across the Middle East has created a strong pull for foreign startups, including companies from South Korea seeking expansion beyond increasingly saturated domestic markets. Yet many fintech products never reach deployment despite technical readiness and visible market demand. Across Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and other MENA markets, regulators are quietly shifting cybersecurity into a licensing requirement, turning cloud infrastructure, audit readiness, and data governance into decisive market-entry barriers for fintech expansion. Saudi Arabia’s FinTech Growth Is Accelerating Alongside Regulatory Pressure Saudi Arabia has rapidly become one of the region’s largest fintech growth markets. According to Saudi Arabia’s Financial Sector Development Program Annual Report 2024, the Kingdom reached 261 operating fintech companies by the end of 2024, surpassing its original 2025 target of 230 companies. Electronic payments also accounted for 79% of total retail payment transactions during the year, while cumulative fintech venture capital investment exceeded SAR 7.6 billion (approx. USD 2.03 billion). The UAE is also strengthening its position as a regional financial technology hub. A Korean Global ICT report estimated the UAE ICT market at around USD 17 billion in 2024, including approximately USD 3.2 billion in fintech and USD 600 million in cybersecurity. The figures reflect how financial services expansion and cybersecurity infrastructure are increasingly developing together across the Gulf’s digital economy push. At the same time, Saudi Arabia’s broader digital transformation agenda under Vision 2030 continues pushing banks, financial institutions, and government-linked platforms toward larger-scale digital infrastructure adoption. That is why Korean startups operating in payments, AI finance, digital banking tools, lending infrastructure, regtech, and financial SaaS increasingly view the Gulf as a strategic growth region. However, expanding into the region is becoming less dependent on product demand alone. Financial regulators are now placing greater weight on cybersecurity governance, operational resilience, and infrastructure accountability before