Money20/20 Middle East closed in Riyadh on Wednesday with the Saudi Central Bank enabling Alipay+ acceptance in the Kingdom and setting out plans to enable Apple’s Tap to Pay on iPhone, two decisions that will change what a visitor or a merchant can do with a phone in Saudi Arabia more than anything a company announced across the three days.

Set them beside Tuesday’s agreement with the Qatar Central Bank on reciprocal acceptance of mada and HIMYAN cards, and the shape of the week becomes clear. Twelve months ago the market-opening announcements at this show came from the companies doing the opening. Google and Alipay declared their arrival in the Kingdom, and Google Pay and Google Wallet went live through Al Rajhi Bank and Riyad Bank. This year the equivalent announcements came from the regulator. Alipay+ acceptance is not a wallet planting a flag, it is SAMA deciding which wallets may be presented at a Saudi terminal, so that international visitors can pay with the app they already carry. Tap to Pay on iPhone is not a product launch, it is a permission that turns every merchant’s phone into a card terminal.

This is what a market looks like when the entry question has been settled and the supervision question has not. The second edition of Money20/20 Middle East was the show where the Kingdom’s financial regulator did most of the opening, and the companies did the building.

Evidence first, then a licence

Nora M. Albakr, Deputy Governor for Financial Innovation at SAMA, opened the closing day with the mechanism set out plainly. Her argument was that monetary and financial stability and the adoption of new technology are not in tension, and that a resilient system is the precondition for innovation that lasts rather than an obstacle to it. The central bank’s approach to emerging technology, she said, rests on testing and evidence before wider adoption and before regulatory decisions, and on backing the things that demonstrate practical value rather than technology for its own sake.

She gave a worked example. Supply chain finance went into SAMA’s regulatory sandbox, was tested there, and has progressed towards licensing. Activity in it has since passed SAR 1.4 billion. That is the sequence the Kingdom has been running since it began licensing open banking providers in March, and it is the same sequence that sat underneath Tabby’s $6.5bn valuation on Monday and barq‘s $329.5m round on Tuesday. The licence comes first, the volume follows, and the capital arrives into a business already operating under supervision.

Open banking itself gave the clearest reading on where that regime has got to. Lean Technologies, which took the first open banking licence in the Kingdom in March, spent the week converting it into distribution. It signed a memorandum of understanding with Bank Albilad to bring open banking data into the bank’s digital services, and a partnership with Safqah Capital to verify investor account ownership so that onboarding and funding on the platform run more smoothly. Neither carries a published value. Both are the licence being used rather than displayed, which is the more useful signal about a regime six months old: its output this year is measured in where the data goes, not in how many firms are permitted to move it.

Small business credit was the week’s real subject

Strip out the payments infrastructure and the single largest theme of the three days was working capital for small companies, which is the most persistent gap in the Saudi financial system and the one the Financial Sector Development Program keeps naming as a priority.

Lendo, the Shariah-compliant debt crowdfunding marketplace, announced a partnership with Quantic Financial Solutions, an asset management fund based in Vienna, under which Quantic will invest in an institutional capital programme of up to SAR 750 million dedicated to working capital financing for Saudi SMEs. It is the largest single commitment to come out of the show, and its structure matters as much as its size: this is international institutional money buying into Saudi SME credit risk through a licensed local originator, rather than a bank widening its own book.

It landed on top of Monday’s launch of the Fina Fund, the direct financing vehicle from SILQ’s embedded finance arm managed by Riyadh-based Joa Capital, which has a target size of SAR 500 million. SILQ puts the Kingdom’s SME financing shortfall at around SAR 400 billion, with SME lending at 11.3 per cent of total bank loans in 2025 against a 2030 target of 20 per cent. Two commitments inside three days do not close a gap of that size, but they are the first evidence that the vehicles being built to close it are now large enough to be worth watching.

At the smaller end, Sanabil Studio, the venture-building arm of the PIF-owned Sanabil Investments, has closed nearly SAR 67 million, about $18 million, in equity and debt for Nayla Finance, its SAMA-licensed microfinance business for micro enterprises and sole traders. The equity was led by Idrisi Ventures with Suhail Ventures, and Blominvest provided a debt facility. It is more than two and a half times Nayla’s previous round.

The capital that came looking for founders

MoneySurge, the show’s pitch competition, finished on the closing day with three winners splitting a $400,000 prize pool that takes no equity in return. Tanami, a Saudi Shariah-compliant private markets investment platform, took Best in Show and $200,000 from a final field of eight. Planto, a Hong Kong company selling cash-flow insight, customer segmentation and wealth analytics to financial institutions, took Fintech to Watch and $100,000, and said it is expanding into Saudi Arabia. The Nigerian payments platform Nearpays took Fintech for Good and $100,000.

Twenty-five startups were selected for the competition from more than 450 fintech companies. A grant pool of that size taking no position on anybody’s cap table is worth more to a founder at seed than the headline figure suggests, and the geography of the winners, one Saudi, one east Asian, one west African, says something about who is now willing to fly to Riyadh to raise.

The clearest new-entrant capital item of the week came from Europe. Speedinvest, the European venture capital firm, announced a SAR 15 million investment in Abwab.ai, an AI credit intelligence and underwriting automation platform, and said it was the firm’s first investment in Saudi Arabia. A first cheque is a smaller number and a larger signal than a follow-on into an established name.

Elsewhere on the floor, Arab National Bank and lite signed a strategic cooperation agreement in financial technology, aimed at supporting the local fintech ecosystem and the needs of the business sector. No value or term was given.

What the stages actually argued about

Two debates ran through the closing day, and both were about control rather than capability.

On 24/7 markets, Tony Ashraf, managing director at BlackRock, made the structural point during a session on what comes after payments. “When markets genuinely don’t close and everything operates 24/7, that will have a fundamental impact on capital markets,” he said. “As money and underlying assets move around the clock, it creates demand for 24/7 yield, and that convergence will be one of the key drivers of change across capital markets.” Continuous settlement is usually discussed as a technology question. Ashraf’s version is a product question: an asset that trades at three in the morning has to pay something at three in the morning.

The other debate was about who carries the consequences when a model is wrong. In a session on the psychology of financial AI, Afzal Hussain Mohammed Nakheeb, founder and chairman of T57.AI, argued for keeping the human in the chain. “AI should advise us and provide the right information, but humans should use that information to make wiser decisions,” he said. “We should not hand over decisions entirely to AI; there must be human involvement in evaluating the information, making the final decision and maintaining accountability.”

That is the same line the Kingdom’s investors drew on Tuesday, when Stride Ventures and HALA Capital both described AI as a challenger to a judgement rather than a substitute for one, and it is the same line Albakr drew from the regulator’s chair on Wednesday morning. For a show built on six content pillars, four of which are about authority rather than product, the industry has landed on a reasonably settled answer: the machine may hold the analysis, the institution still holds the accountability.

Abdulaziz S. Abanmi, Deputy Governor for Payments at SAMA, closed the event. His reading was that the week reflected a clear national vision and continued investment in infrastructure and in people, and that the Kingdom is not keeping pace with the sector so much as building the foundations others will use.

Annabelle Mander, executive vice president at Tahaluf, gave the organiser’s own verdict on what had changed. “There is obviously huge interest in the market, but increasingly the conversations are about what companies are going to do here, who they are going to work with and where they see the opportunities to grow,” she said.

That is a fair description of the three days. Saudi Arabia had 371 fintech companies operating by the end of August, against a National Fintech Strategy target of 525 by 2030, and the questions being asked in Malham this week were about what those companies are permitted to do, who will fund them and which bank will carry their data. Last year the entries were announced by the companies making them. This year they were announced by the central bank.

Money20/20 Middle East returns to the Riyadh Exhibition and Convention Centre in Malham from 14 to 16 September 2027.

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