Five Saudi payments questions that Money20/20 could actually answer

The useful way to read a payments conference is as a deadline. Things that were agreed months ago either have a status update by the time the doors open, or they do not, and the absence is as informative as the announcement. Five Saudi payments questions are open going into Money20/20 Middle East, and none of them needs new news to resolve. The first is Alipay+ acceptance. SAMA and Ant International signed an agreement to enable acceptance of Alipay+ payments through mada by 2026, allowing Saudi merchants including small businesses to take cross-border QR payments from wallets in a network that Ant International describes as connecting more than 1.7 billion accounts across 36 partner wallets. The agreement was signed at the previous Money20/20 Middle East. The question now is not whether it will happen but how many merchants can take those payments today. A merchant count would settle it. Nothing else will. The second is open banking usage. SAMA moved open banking from sandbox to licensed activity in March 2026, and licensing has continued, with Malaa Company for Information Technology licensed for payment account information services in July, taking licensed payment services companies to 33. Not one participant has published a connected account number, a consent renewal rate or a transaction volume. Licences are a measure of regulatory progress. They are not a measure of use, and the sector has been reporting the first as if it were the second. The third is what Google Pay does next. Google Pay and Google Wallet launched in the Kingdom through mada starting with Al Rajhi Bank and Riyad Bank customers, with tap to pay in stores first and online and in-app payments expected to follow. Online and in-app is the commercially significant half. In-store contactless is convenience. Payment inside apps and on the web is where merchant checkout economics and conversion rates actually move, and where a wallet becomes part of a merchant's stack rather than a way to leave a card at home. The fourth is what happens above 85 percent. SAMA reported electronic payments at 85 percent of total retail payments in 2025, up from 79 percent in 2024, against a national target of 70 percent non-cash by 2030. On that measure the target has been passed, which means the framing that has driven Saudi payments policy for a decade, converting cash, is largely finished as a growth story. What replaces it is not obvious from the outside. Value-added services on the rail, merchant financing, loyalty, data, cross-border. The industry has not yet articulated a common answer, and a conference is where that would surface. The fifth is the boundary between payments and credit. Tabby obtained consumer finance and SME finance licences from SAMA, extending it beyond buy now pay later into longer-term consumer financing and working capital for businesses, with reported terms allowing purchases above SAR 2,000 to be financed up to SAR 50,000 over as much as 12 months. Tamara secured Saudi Arabia's first consumer finance licence from SAMA in March 2025. Both companies started as payment-adjacent and are becoming lenders. That progression has consequences for capital, for regulation and for risk that the payments framing does not capture, and the sector talks about it far less than it talks about growth. What ties these together is that every one is answerable with a figure that somebody already has. Merchants live. Connected accounts. Whether in-app payments have shipped. What the industry is monetising above the rail. What the loan books look like now that payment companies are lending. The counterpoint, and it is a fair one, is that companies do not publish operating metrics at conferences because conferences are for selling and for relationships, and that competitive sensitivity is a real reason to withhold numbers. That is true and it does not change the reading. A sector that has been announcing agreements for three years and has not yet published usage is at the stage where usage is the only interesting thing left to announce. TechScoop will report announcements when they are made and will not treat an exhibitor listing or a panel appearance as one. On these five, the questions are already written.