Saudi financial inclusion has largely solved consumers. Microbusinesses are the harder half

Financial inclusion in Saudi Arabia has been discussed for a decade as a consumer question, and on the measure most used it is close to answered. SAMA reported electronic payments at 85 percent of total retail payments in 2025, up from 79 percent the year before, against a national target of 70 percent non-cash transactions by 2030 that has already been passed. Google Pay and Samsung Pay are live over mada, digital banks are licensed, and a Saudi consumer who wants to transact electronically can. The population that remains outside is not consumers. It is the smallest businesses, and their problem is different in kind. A microbusiness, a single restaurant, a small retailer, a workshop, a delivery operator, usually has payment acceptance. What it does not have is credit. And credit is the thing that determines whether it can buy stock ahead of a season, replace a broken machine, take on an order larger than its cash position, or survive two slow months. The reason it does not have credit is not reluctance on the part of banks. It is arithmetic. Assessing a loan properly costs roughly the same whether the loan is for SAR 50,000 or SAR 5 million: someone has to understand the business, verify the numbers, assess the risk and monitor the exposure. On a large loan that cost is a rounding error against the margin. On a small one it exceeds it. Add the absence of audited accounts, collateral and credit history at the small end and the result is a market that no rational bank serves, in Saudi Arabia and almost everywhere else. What changes the arithmetic is not goodwill. It is data that arrives without anyone collecting it. This is why the companies making progress on the Saudi microbusiness problem are the ones that already run the software these businesses operate on. Foodics launched Foodics Capital, a $100 million lending arm offering Shariah-compliant loans to small food and beverage businesses from around $5,000 up to about $133,000, and it can see every transaction its borrowers process. SILQ's Fina platform, which secured $75 million in Shariah-compliant financing from Fasanara Capital, sits inside procurement for more than 50,000 businesses served through the group's Sary platform. Nayla, built through Sanabil Studio, raised about $18 million in a pre-Series A combining equity with a debt facility led by BLOMINVEST specifically to lend to micro-businesses. In each case the underwriting problem is solved by position rather than by cleverness. The lender does not need the borrower to produce financial statements, because it is already watching the money move. Licensed open banking is what would extend that beyond platform-owned relationships. SAMA moved open banking from sandbox to licensed activity in March 2026, and account information services let a lender read a business's bank transaction history with consent rather than inferring it from a platform it happens to control. That is the mechanism by which a microbusiness that is not on anyone's point-of-sale system could still be underwritten. Whether it is being used that way is unknown, because no participant has published usage figures. There are two things worth being careful about in this story. The first is that expanding credit access is not automatically a good outcome. A microbusiness lent money it cannot repay is worse off than one refused, and the sector's headline metrics, loan book growth and approval rates, all point in the direction of lending more. The measure that would show whether inclusion is working is cohort default performance and what happens to borrowers who default, and nobody publishes either. The second is concentration. If microbusiness credit is available primarily through the software platform a business happens to use, then access depends on that choice, and switching software becomes a decision about financing as well as operations. That is a real form of lock-in and it lands on the businesses with the least ability to absorb it. The counterpoint is that platform-based underwriting is currently the only approach that works at this size, and a market with imperfect access is better than one with none. The SME credit gap in the region is large by any estimate, and every loan written to a business a bank would not have assessed is a business that got capital. The proof point is not a bigger loan book. It is a lender publishing cohort default rates alongside its growth figures, and an open banking participant publishing how many businesses have connected an account. Both numbers exist inside these companies. Money20/20 is where they would most naturally appear.