Fina secures SAR 282 million financing from Fasanara

Fina, the fintech arm of Saudi B2B platform SILQ, has secured a Shariah compliant financing facility worth 75 million dollars, or roughly SAR 282 million, from London headquartered global investment manager Fasanara Capital. The deal adds substantial new lending capacity to a platform that has been steadily building out embedded financial services for small and medium sized businesses across the kingdom, and it lands just weeks after Fina's parent company closed a separate financing facility with a different international lender. Fasanara Capital, which manages roughly 6 billion dollars in assets globally and has built a track record investing in fintech lending and technology enabled credit platforms, structured the facility to work within Islamic finance principles rather than through conventional interest based lending. The capital will flow through Fina's existing model, which leans on merchants' commercial activity, transaction history, and day to day operational data to extend working capital, rather than relying purely on the kind of traditional credit assessments that often shut smaller businesses out of formal lending channels. That approach lets Fina offer financing directly inside the digital workflows businesses already use to purchase inventory, manage payments, and run daily operations, rather than requiring them to apply for credit through a separate, slower process. Mohammed AlDosari, co founder and chief executive of SILQ Financial, framed the financing as validation of a model built specifically around how merchants actually operate rather than around traditional lending assumptions. According to the company, the broader SILQ ecosystem, which combines its Sary procurement platform with Fina's embedded finance tools, has already facilitated more than 5.3 billion dollars in transaction volume across Saudi Arabia. With this new capital in place, the company says it plans to deploy nearly 800 million dollars in financing to more than 2,000 businesses over the coming year, building on the roughly 400 million dollars in working capital it distributed over the past twelve months. The Fasanara facility follows closely on the heels of a separate 20 million dollar Shariah compliant financing deal SILQ closed with emerging markets asset manager Gemcorp Capital, which marked that firm's first ever direct lending transaction in Saudi Arabia. Taken together, the two facilities give Fina access to roughly 95 million dollars in fresh lending capacity within the span of just a few weeks, a pace that points to strong investor appetite for backing embedded finance platforms serving the Saudi SME segment specifically, rather than fintech more broadly. That appetite makes sense given the scale of the gap these companies are trying to fill. Despite years of steady growth in SME lending, Saudi Arabia's financing gap for small and medium businesses is still estimated at around SAR 300 billion, according to the Saudi SME Bank, a figure that underscores just how much room remains for alternative financing models to grow even as traditional banks expand their own SME lending books. The Saudi government has continued pushing this agenda hard under Vision 2030, aiming to lift the SME sector's contribution to GDP while directing banks to allocate a larger share of their loan portfolios toward smaller firms, a policy backdrop that has made embedded finance platforms like Fina increasingly attractive to international private credit managers looking for exposure to Gulf SME lending without necessarily building out their own local banking infrastructure. Fasanara itself has been particularly active in this space, having entered the Saudi market in early 2025 with a 60 million dollar securitization facility backing peer to peer lending platform Forus, and later signing an agreement with Saudi Arabia's Ministry of Investment aimed at scaling local fintech enabled lending initiatives to more than SAR 3 billion. For the broader region, deals like this reflect a pattern playing out across the Gulf more generally, where international investment banks and specialist private credit managers, from Fasanara and Gemcorp to larger players like Jefferies, which recently led a 125 million dollar financing deal for Saudi fintech Erad, are increasingly treating Saudi Arabia's SME lending gap as a genuine institutional opportunity rather than a niche corner of the market. As more of these facilities close in quick succession, the combination of policy support, unmet SME demand, and growing international investor comfort with Shariah compliant structures looks set to keep pulling private credit capital into Saudi Arabia's embedded finance sector at a steady clip.