Saudi Arabia has moved well beyond simply going cashless. Electronic payments now account for 85% of retail transactions. The next competition is over the infrastructure behind those payments — making them faster, cheaper, and more useful for businesses. Joining me at Money 20/20 Riyadh is Khalil Alami, Founder and CEO of Telr.
Thank you for having me. Nice to meet you.
Saudi Arabia is already at 85% electronic payments. Has the conversation moved beyond getting people to pay digitally — and if so, what is the new battleground?
Absolutely. Saudi Arabia is an excellent example in the region of becoming a digital economy. Today it is not about just getting adoption onto digital payments. Today it is all about speed. The concentration span of any user is becoming less and less — you want to do everything within a scroll. So speed of payment, UI and UX — that is our goldmine. We spend a lot of time there making sure it is efficient, fast, and quick. But we have the adoption. We have the speed. Now it is about how do you reduce the settlement cycle — making sure that merchants and SMEs, which constitute over 80 to 85% of the economy, get their money faster in order to move inventory and keep the business running.
What actually separates good payment infrastructure from bad infrastructure today?
All those things — approval rates, settlement speed, reconciliation costs — are extremely important. But what is most critical right now is resilience. You need to make sure that your payment infrastructure is resilient. You are always available, always mission critical. Online e-commerce transactions happen 24/7 — you might have a transaction at any moment and you need to be there. Resilience is the most important part.
Telr now works with more than 40,000 merchants and processes over 5 million transactions a month. What are those merchants asking for today that they were not asking three or four years ago?
With the adoption of e-commerce and online payments — especially after the pandemic accelerated everything — the conversation today is not only about accepting payments online, but how do we make sure the adoption remains and that we can scale. When we started, merchants were smaller and volumes were smaller. Today the merchants are bigger. They need more scale. We need to be there with them as they scale and grow — always innovating, adding new payment methods, making sure we are a one-stop shop for everything that has to do with payments for our merchants.
Telr has moved beyond being just a payment gateway into financing, invoicing, BNPL, and broader merchant services. At what point does a payments company become part of the merchant's operating system?
From day one. We are responsible for collecting the revenue of that merchant — which is at the heart and core of what they do. So from day one, any payments processor or orchestrator is actually part of the DNA of any online merchant. We continue to focus on that and make sure that we are always there as they scale.
How much can payment data help bring smaller businesses into the formal financial system?
Data is extremely important. In every economy you have the gig economy, home bakers, people selling on social media — smaller payments, people trying to make extra income. We look at that data to figure out how to properly serve those people. We introduced what we call Telr Social Commerce — where a home-based business can actually collect payments properly, within the regulation of the country, in order to deliver their goods or services from home.
What development would convince you that the region has genuinely entered the next phase of digital commerce?
Having stablecoin or crypto regulations issued by the Central Bank of Saudi Arabia — that would be fantastic. To give a final clear vision and direction on what to do with that. That is something I would love to see at Money 20/20 next year. You will see more and more action happening on stablecoins — cross-border settlement speed and cost is extremely important. And I know there is the other coin that has been UAE and Saudi led, with multiple cross-border transactions that have been quite a success story as well.
Khalil, it has been amazing having you. Thank you very much.
Thank you so much. Being here at Money 20/20 is always a successful event. Thank you.
