Saudi Arabia has exceeded its cashless goals with a leading real-time payments system – now the focus shifts to improving cross-border flows
When Saudi Arabia set an ambitious target that 70% of transactions should be cashless by 2025, the timeline felt bold. But what happened next was bolder still.
Data from the Saudi central bank (Sama) shows electronic payments accounted for 85% of total retail payments in 2025, up from 79% in 2024, and the number of electronic transactions reached 14.6 billion, compared to 12.6 billion in 2024.
The similarities with the oil boom run deeper than geography. For decades, the kingdom’s prosperity flowed from a single resource extracted from the ground – and refined and distributed through infrastructure built at enormous scale and cost. Real-time payment infrastructure may follow a similar trajectory.
Here the value is not in any individual transaction. It is in the network, the rails, the systems of trust and interoperability that allow money to move at the speed of information. And like oil in its early decades, the architecture built now will define how capital and commerce move across the region for generations to come.
Building the rails
The architecture underpinning Saudi Arabia’s transformation is less visible than the headline figures, but no less significant. Sama’s Instant Payment System, sarie, is built on the ISO 20022 standard and has been processing peer-to-peer, peer-to-business and business-to-business payments in real time – 24 hours a day, seven days a week – since its launch in 2021.
By 2024, it was delivering close to 600 million instant payment transactions annually. The Sadad bill payment platform, launched in 2004 and now processing over 360 million bills a year with a 2024 value of SR817bn, provides the institutional backbone for consumer-to-business flows. Above these layers, more than 280 licensed fintech companies are building products for one of the most digitally connected and youngest populations in the world.
What distinguishes Saudi Arabia’s transformation from digital payment adoption elsewhere is the degree to which it was architected from the ground up. The Saudi Central Bank’s Universal Acceptance programme – which standardised merchant pricing for debit card payments and drove terminal rollouts across the kingdom – helped card transaction volumes at point of sale grow more than thirtyfold between 2014 and 2024. A regulatory sandbox, established in 2018, has provided a structured pathway for fintechs to test and refine their offerings before entering the market, with more than 89 companies having graduated to full licensing by November 2023.
And when Sama issued its Open Banking Framework in November 2022, the effect on the banking landscape was significant. By requiring all banks to operate to the same technical standards, it created a more consistent experience across institutions – and gave account holders something they had not previously had: the freedom to use any bank of their choosing to fund a transaction.
The results speak for themselves: a payment ecosystem that, within a decade, has moved from the margins of digital adoption to the leading edge of it. But headline figures only tell part of the story. Regulatory architecture, however well-designed, only delivers its full value when the institutions operating within it – banks, fintechs, payment providers – are genuinely committed to building on top of it. The sarie instant payment system was deployed across all local banks simultaneously. The Open Banking Lab has seen banks and fintechs develop, test, and certify services side by side. In Saudi Arabia, the commitment has matched the ambition.
The corridor challenge
Domestic infrastructure, however impressive, only tells part of the story. Saudi Arabia is the world’s second-largest source of outbound remittances, with expatriate workers sending SR98.6bn in the first seven months of 2025 alone — a 22.3% increase year-on-year. These flows connect the kingdom to some of the world’s most important remittance corridors: India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, the Philippines, Egypt and Indonesia. For the millions of workers sustaining families across these corridors, the payment experience itself is critical, as it determines whether a transfer arrives before school fees are due, whether it reaches a mobile wallet or requires a journey to a cash pickup point, or whether the fee erodes a meaningful portion of what was sent.
This is where the gap between domestic and cross-border experience begins to matter. A payment made on sarie within the kingdom settles instantly and at near-zero cost to the end user. The same worker sending money to Dhaka or Manila faces a different set of conditions.
The World Bank’s Remittance Prices Worldwide tracker put the global average remittance fee at 6.49% in Q1 2025. Saudi Arabia recorded an average cost of 5.23% for a standard $200 transfer in Q1 2025, ranking fourth lowest among G20 sending countries. But with the global average still at 6.49% – more than double the UN’s SDG 10.c target of 3% by 2030 – the cross-border cost environment, worldwide, remains pricier than the international community would prefer.
The gap between what the domestic infrastructure now delivers and what cross-border infrastructure still costs is not an indictment of Saudi Arabia’s payment modernisation. But it does give us an indication of where the next phase of work should lie.
The next question is about the pipelines: the cross-border connectivity, the interoperability standards, the corridor-level relationships that allow the kingdom’s real-time payment capacity to extend its reach
Beyond the domestic perimeter
Domestic real-time payment systems, however sophisticated, are designed to operate within a known perimeter. The rules are shared, the participants are licensed by the same authority, the settlement infrastructure is controlled.
Cross-border payments require something categorically different: the ability to extend trust across jurisdictions that do not share regulatory frameworks, currencies or technical standards. This is less a payment problem than a sovereignty problem, and it explains why the gap between domestic and cross-border performance has proved so persistent even as both sides have modernised.
But as interoperability frameworks mature, through bilateral central bank agreements, regional payment linkages, and the gradual adoption of shared standards like ISO 20022, the friction that has historically defined cross-border transfers is beginning to ease. Saudi Arabia’s position as a major remittance-sending economy gives it both a stake in accelerating that process and a platform to shape how the regional architecture develops.
What comes next
Saudi Arabia’s FinTech Strategy, approved by the Council of Ministers in May 2022, sets out an explicit ambition: to establish Riyadh as a global fintech hub and position the kingdom among the leading countries in the field. The infrastructure already in place gives that ambition credible foundations.
The oil analogy ultimately points somewhere specific. The value of oil was never simply in extraction; it was in the infrastructure that got it from the ground to where it was needed. Pipelines, refineries, distribution networks: these were the systems that determined which nations could translate natural endowment into economic influence. Saudi Arabia has built extraordinary domestic payment infrastructure. The next question is about the pipelines: the cross-border connectivity, the interoperability standards, the corridor-level relationships that allow the kingdom’s real-time payment capacity to extend its reach.
As those systems mature, and the pace of development suggests they will, the flows of capital, commerce and remittances that run through the Middle East will increasingly move at the speed and cost that domestic payments already achieve. That trajectory will make the region’s payment transformation worth watching.
