Saudi open banking is licensed now, and nobody has published usage

Saudi open banking crossed a line in March 2026 that it will not cross back over. SAMA moved it from a controlled sandbox initiative into a formally supervised and licensed financial activity, which means that offering account information services, payment initiation services or confirmation of availability of funds now requires a licence. A pilot, a place in the sandbox or a bilateral agreement with a bank is no longer enough. That is the end of the experimental phase, and it should change what the sector is judged on. Licensing has continued since, and SAMA licensed Malaa Company for Information Technology to provide payment account information services in July 2026, bringing the number of licensed payment services companies in the Kingdom to 33. Here is the problem heading into Money20/20 Middle East. Not one participant, and not the regulator, has published a figure for how many people or businesses are actually using open banking in Saudi Arabia. No connected account count. No monthly active consent figure. No transaction volume through payment initiation. Nothing. That gap matters more than it might sound, because the history of open banking internationally is a history of infrastructure being built and then not used. The United Kingdom, which started earliest, spent years with a technically complete framework and adoption confined to a small set of use cases, mostly accounting software and lending affordability checks. The European experience under the second payment services directive was similar, with payment initiation in particular taking far longer to find volume than the regulation anticipated. In both cases the constraint was not the API. It was that consumers had no compelling reason to connect an account, and that the connection experience was worse than the alternative. Saudi Arabia has structural advantages that make a different outcome plausible. National digital identity through Nafath means the consent step can be tied to an identity system people already use daily, which removes the friction that undermined open banking elsewhere. Mobile banking penetration is high, the banking sector is concentrated enough that a small number of integrations covers most accounts, and electronic payments reached 85 percent of retail payments in 2025 by SAMA's own measure, up from 79 percent the year before. A population already transacting digitally is a better starting point than one being persuaded to. The advantages do not guarantee the outcome. Payment initiation in particular has a specific competitive problem in this market: mada already provides a fast, cheap, universally accepted domestic payment rail. In markets where open banking payments succeeded, they succeeded by undercutting expensive card interchange. Where the domestic debit rail is already efficient and ubiquitous, the commercial argument for merchants to adopt an alternative is weaker. Account information has the clearer path, because lending affordability, personal financial management, accounting integration and SME credit underwriting all need data rather than a payment rail. That is where the connection to the rest of the fintech market is. Saudi lending businesses are scaling, and underwriting is the constraint on all of them. A micro-business lender approving a loan needs to see cash flow. Traditionally that means bank statements uploaded as documents, which are slow to process and easy to falsify. Licensed account information services are the mechanism that turns that into an API call. If open banking finds volume in the Kingdom, it will most likely be here first, invisible to consumers, sitting inside credit decisions. Which makes the disclosure gap the thing to press on during the event. Four questions would settle the state of the market, and every one of them is answerable by a participant who is doing well. How many accounts are connected through your service today, and what is the trend over the past two quarters. What proportion of consents are renewed rather than lapsing at expiry, since a consent that is never renewed describes a user who tried it once. What is the split between account information and payment initiation in your volumes. And which use case is producing the volume: lending, personal finance, accounting, or something else. A company with real traction answers all four without hesitating. A company whose progress is a licence will answer with the licence. The counterpoint is fair and worth stating. Open banking took six years to produce meaningful volume in the United Kingdom, and Saudi Arabia moved to licensed activity six months ago. Judging adoption now is premature, and the regulator's sequencing, sandbox first, then licensing, then supervision, is a more careful path than the big-bang mandates that produced technically compliant and commercially inert frameworks elsewhere. Both things hold. It is early, and the absence of any published adoption figure from any participant is still the most conspicuo