Last week at Money20/20 Middle East in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia’s central bank (SAMA) unveiled
two headline announcements that could reshape the payments landscape:
Far from being routine launches, these moves demonstrate how Saudi Arabia is structuring its payments ecosystem: ambitious in scale, pragmatic in execution, and tightly aligned with Vision 2030’s digital transformation agenda.
A Pragmatic Backbone: mada
By leveraging mada, Saudi’s national payment scheme (the domestic switch that connects banks, ATMs, POS and cards), SAMA reinforces local control and infrastructure reliability. Innovation happens on rails the Kingdom owns and operates rather than
outsourcing the core to international players.
This clearly highlights that Saudi welcomes global partnerships, but on terms that protect sovereignty and align with national goals.
The Power of Partnerships
Rather than reinventing the wheel, SAMA is inviting global giants like Google and Ant to plug into the ecosystem. That leapfrogs much of the friction that comes with building a purely homegrown wallet, while instantly expanding convenience for millions
of users.
For locals, it means having more choice and seamless digital wallet payments. For international visitors, especially from Asia, it means being able to use familiar wallets like Alipay+ without friction which is a win for tourism, retail, and cross-border
commerce.
Shifting Behaviours, Not Just Payments
If Saudi gets this right, the impact could be profound, nudging millions of people away from cash and plastic cards toward a fully digital experience. That shift has ripple effects:
We’ve already seen wallet entry accelerate adoption in other markets. Across the GCC, digital wallet usage is growing at ~34% annually, with 38 million users in 2024, a figure expected to surge by 2030. In the wider Middle East & Africa, the digital
wallet market is set to grow nearly fivefold, from USD 20.5 billion in 2023 to USD 103.8 billion by 2032. The trajectory is clear: when new wallets enter, usage scales fast.
Already, Saudi is riding this momentum: the number of licensed fintech firms has jumped from 82 in 2022 to 281 in 2025, with 79% of retail transactions now electronic. This week’s announcements are fuel on that fire.
At Paymentology, we see these developments as validation of the model we’ve been championing: global technology, local rails. SAMA’s approach with mada mirrors how we enable banks and fintechs to innovate on a cloud-first, next-gen issuing platform
while staying fully compliant with local requirements, whether that’s domestic schemes like mada, local data residency, or on-soil processing.
For us, the opportunity now is to help partners in Saudi harness these new wallets, launching products that are tokenised, interoperable, and designed for the digital-first consumer that Vision 2030 is accelerating.
Overall, these announcements are smart moves by SAMA. They strike the right balance between ambition and pragmatism. By integrating new wallets onto mada, and combining that with the scale of global players, Saudi is setting the stage for behavioural
change at a national level.
Payments may seem like the plumbing of the economy, but when you re-engineer the pipes, everything that flows through them can change. Saudi is doing exactly that, and it will be fascinating to see how this shapes the future of finance in the Kingdom.
