Saudi Arabia

Vision 2030 cashless target has been over-delivered five years early

SAMA's 2025 annual payments figures put electronic payments at 85% of retail transactions, against an original Vision 2030 target of 70% by 2030. The drivers — mada-default issuance, mandatory Apple Pay/Google Pay on mada, ZATCA e-invoicing forcing SME acceptance — were policy-driven rather than consumer-pull. The 2026 conversation is no longer about adoption; it is about exporting the rail stack regionally through AFAQ and bilateral instant-payment corridors.

mada routes 84% of domestic card volume — a structural floor on scheme economics

Every Saudi current account is issued a mada card by mandate; Visa/Mastercard activate only on international use. Domestic transactions, including Apple Pay, Google Pay and Samsung Pay flows, settle on mada switching at substantially lower per-transaction economics than scheme-routed equivalents. The model is the most aggressive deployment of a domestic scheme in any G20 economy and is being studied by Egypt (Meeza), UAE (Jaywan) and Türkiye (Troy) as the operating template.

sarie has become the cheapest cleared rail and is taking A2A share monthly

sarie cleared SAR 2.5 trillion in 2024 with zero per-transaction consumer fees, and Q1 2026 monthly volumes from SAMA imply roughly 1.5 billion transactions annualised. Banking-system A2A migration from legacy SARIE to sarie is now effectively complete; the open question is whether merchant-payment use cases scale beyond the SAR 20,000 per-transaction cap before SAMA lifts it. The same arc seen on UPI (India) and Pix (Brazil) is visible in the 2024–26 inflection.

SAMA's AFAQ platform now connects sarie to UAE Aani (live since March 2026) and is targeting Bahrain AFS and Kuwait KNET integration through Q4 2026. The corridor design — ISO 20022-native, central-bank-operated, settled in domestic currency at each leg — bypasses the correspondent-bank intermediation that drives GCC remittance pricing. Operators able to plug payouts and acquiring into AFAQ before the Q4 2026 settlement go-live have a one-cycle advantage.

25.4 million pilgrims spent SAR 178 billion in 2024; mada Pay Hajj rolled out for the 1447H season allows tap-to-pay across a certified Mecca and Medina merchant fleet with no riyal cash needed. The economics are unusual — a fixed-window, captive-audience, foreign-card-heavy acceptance corridor — and the operating template (issuer agnostic, mada-switched) is portable to other Saudi tourism megaprojects (NEOM, Diriyah, Red Sea).

SAMA's Open Banking Framework moves from account-information to payment-initiation services with 11 banks mandated live by June 2026 and Lean Technologies, Tarabut and Mod5r authorised as TSPs. PIS on sarie rails carries the same zero-fee economics that have driven A2A migration, and exposes Saudi SMB workflows (invoice payments, payroll, supplier settlement) to non-bank developers for the first time. The first cohort of certified TSPs sits at the front of the build queue.