Middle East & North Africa · GDP rank #18
Saudi Arabia
SA · SAR @ 0.2667/USD
Saudi Arabia has structurally over-delivered its Vision 2030 cashless objective — SAMA reported 85% of retail transactions ran non-cash in 2025, well ahead of the original 70%-by-2030 target. The system is anchored by mada, the SAMA-owned domestic debit scheme that routes ~84% of card volume; sarie, the 24/7 instant rail that scaled from 22% to >70% of retail A2A in three years; and an Apple Pay deployment with the highest iPhone penetration in MENA. The next chapter is exporting the stack regionally through the AFAQ GCC bridge.
Tab 02
Consumer payments
How consumers actually pay: the share of cash, the stock and flow of cards, the scheme split at checkout, which mobile wallets matter, and how broadly POS acceptance reaches.
Every figure is authored against a named publisher — click the ⓘ anywhere to open the source panel with the underlying URL and access date.
Cash share of POS volume
Cash share of POS value
Debit-card penetration
Credit-card penetration
Payment mix
Cash vs. non-cash
The authored corpus for this country carries a single cash figure; the remainder is reported as a pooled non-cash bucket. See the card and wallet sections for the break-down within that bucket.
Share of POS
- Cash15%
- Non-cash (cards + wallets + A2A)85%
Cash behaviour
- Trend
- declining
- Context
- Cash share fell from 68% in 2019 to ~15% in 2025 — one of the steepest six-year declines globally, driven by mada Atheer contactless + Apple Pay (live 2019) + forced SME acceptance via ZATCA e-invoicing.
Source · Saudi Central Bank (SAMA)
Scheme share
Which networks clear the card volume
Scheme share is the split of general-purpose card purchase volume — not issuance, not count of cards. A high domestic share (e.g. UnionPay, RuPay, ELO) means a large share of card flow never touches a global scheme.
mada routes all domestic transactions; co-badging with Visa/Mastercard activates only on international use. Apple Pay, Google Pay and Samsung Pay are all mada-first.
Share of card volume
- Mada84%
- Visa9%
- Mastercard6%
- Amex1%
Debit transactions · 2024
Active debit cards
Credit transactions · 2024
Active credit cards
Mobile wallets
Where wallets actually land
User counts are the best single scalar for wallet reach, but they understate usage intensity in markets where one super-app carries multi-digit trillions of renminbi or rupees. For flow, see the rails tab.
Active users
- STC Pay14.2M
e-wallet + digital bank
- urpay5.4M
e-wallet
- Apple Pay19.4M
device wallet
Notable wallets
STC Pay
e-wallet + digital bank
Operator · STC Pay (Digital Bank) — licensed by SAMA as a full digital bank since 2022
Launched 2017 as a wallet; pivoted to full digital-bank licence after SAMA's digital-bank framework; Rakbank (UAE) acquired 20% in 2020 at SAR 4.7bn valuation.
STC Pay
urpay
e-wallet
Operator · urpay (AlRajhi Bank subsidiary)
urpay
Apple Pay
device wallet
Operator · Apple
Live February 2019; penetration among iPhone users exceeds 95% — highest globally per SAMA.
SAMA
Acceptance
- POS terminals
- 1.6M
- POS per million people
- 45.9k
- QR acceptance
- mada QR — unified domestic standard mandatory at all Saudi Payments-certified acquirers since 2022
Source · Saudi Payments