At Money 20/20 in Riyadh, where fintech does business. My next guest is Muath Alduhishy, Chief Strategy Officer at Moyasar, one of Saudi Arabia's leading payment gateways licensed by the Saudi Central Bank. Muath, welcome to Wall Street to Mena.
Thank you for having me.
What brought Moyasar here to Money 20/20 in Riyadh?
We are one of the leading payments companies in Saudi Arabia, holding almost 20% of the Saudi market when it comes to e-commerce payments. We believe Money 20/20 is one of the best venues to showcase our products, services, and plans, and to engage and involve our partners here in the region and in Saudi Arabia. It is not just a regional event — we have seen faces from across the world. Very exciting.
As a home-grown Saudi company, what does it mean to host this event in your own market?
I see it as a celebration of what has been happening for years. In the past ten years, we have had Vision 2030 — a nationwide programme working across all vital sectors including the financial sector. The pace of growth we have seen in the past ten years is something we have not seen for maybe 30 to 40 years in Saudi. Saudi Arabia is now one of the leading nations globally when it comes to digitalisation — I believe it is number two in the G20 countries in terms of the rate of digital transformation. This has been trickling down across sectors, including the financial sector, which led to the evolution of the fintech industry here.
What sets Saudi Arabia's fintech ecosystem apart from other markets today?
We have a financial sector that is highly mature when it comes to financial services, and on the other side, an ICT and digital sector that has been evolving at an impressive pace. The fusion of both gives very fertile ground for fintech. In eight years, the number of fintech companies jumped from 20 companies to over 300 today. Digital payments are now at 84% of all transactions in Saudi — compared to around 25 to 30% about ten years ago. We are seeing the results. It is not a thesis. It is something we have seen and expect to grow even further.
How does the surge in investment into Saudi fintech help the sector diversify?
Capital is the fuel for growth in any sector. We have seen that globally and locally with technology startups. Saudi Arabia is the leading investment hub for fintech across the region — I believe more than $2 billion has been poured into capital investments in fintech startups, and we expect that to increase even further.
What is the biggest demand shift you are seeing from merchants right now?
Almost every sector in Saudi is growing at a fast pace. We are sector-agnostic — we work with government entities, startups and SMEs, large corporations and enterprises, and even banks, providing payment infrastructure. But what we believe will happen in the next few years is the hyper-growth of B2B payments. Most of what has happened in payments in Saudi has been around consumer-to-business and consumer-to-consumer. We expect the next wave to be B2B — transactions and financial services between businesses — which is four to five times the size of consumer-to-business and has not been as well penetrated by fintech yet. That is where we are working with our partners, merchants, and marketplaces right now.
What are you revealing at Money 20/20?
The highlight of what we are doing here is the reveal of our R&D activities from the past year — around agentic e-commerce, which we believe will be one of the key trends in e-commerce in the next few years. We developed our own solution using AI for machine-to-machine payments — without a human in the loop. That is the aspiration, but we are taking it gradually. We are working hand-in-hand with regulators and the main technology providers in the region, and we hope to see it in the market by the end of this year.
Looking at the next five years — what is the big picture?
Embedded finance and open finance. Most of what we have seen in fintech so far has been the front-end application layer. We are now moving down toward the middleware — the engine of the financial industry. Infrastructure, payment systems, open banking, data rails between banks and financial institutions. When it comes to the private sector, embedded finance will enable marketplaces and e-commerce platforms to have a fintech operating system within their stack — transforming each marketplace into a fintech company in its own right. We have seen this model globally in the US, Europe, and China. We believe it will happen here in the region, and providers like us who are fully regulated with the right licensing and years of market experience are the right partners for these marketplaces.
Thank you so much for being with us.
Thank you. It is a pleasure.
