Why The Next Saudi Unicorn Will Likely Be A Fintech Built On Banking-As-A-Service

Saudi Arabia’s fintech progress is now part of the country’s everyday rhythm, and the numbers behind it are hard to miss.

The Saudi Central Bank (SAMA) reports that electronic payments accounted for 79 percent of retail transactions in 2024, up from 70 percent in 2023, with non-cash payments reaching 12.6 billion transactions across the year. The fintech base has climbed to around 261 companies by the end of 2024, showing steady depth in the builder community.

Meanwhile, the SAMA Regulatory Sandbox continues to function as a live route to market, with 25 fintechs currently testing under supervision, and roughly 50 having been permitted through it since its launch in 2018. Taken together, these figures describe a market that has built real traction and is moving with speed.

As momentum builds, the question shifts from what consumers are adopting to where lasting value will be created, and which kind of company is best positioned to reach meaningful scale in this environment. Because there is a second story running alongside the consumer adoption one, and that story sits deeper in the stack, which is often where the companies that end up defining a market take shape.

In fintech, that deeper layer is infrastructure. It shapes how quickly new products can be built, how safely they can be tested, and how confidently they can scale. Every fintech ecosystem reaches a point where the rails underneath matter as much as the experiences on top. When that point arrives, the startups most likely to become unicorns tend to be the ones building on new banking foundations that make the ecosystem faster and easier to work in.

Global fintech shows this clearly. Early waves in most markets are led by visible consumer products, because those are easy to understand and closely tied to new habits. Over time, value drifts downward into infrastructure, because the most enduring companies are the ones that simplify the hard parts of financial services for everyone else. Stripe grew into a giant by turning payments into something developers could integrate quickly and reliably. Plaid became a quiet pillar of the US fintech boom by giving startups secure access to bank data. Solaris expanded in Europe by offering a regulated banking layer that allowed other companies to launch products without becoming banks themselves. These businesses were built around being useful to other builders, and that usefulness compounded into value.

Saudi Arabia is now moving into the part of the cycle where this pattern can repeat. Digital finance is mainstream, usage is high, and policy has been consistent enough that founders can plan with confidence. Practical moves to widen digital wallet and payments acceptance reinforce the direction of travel toward a modern financial system. The more consequential development is that building fintech in the Kingdom is getting structurally easier. Sandbox pathways give teams a safer, clearer way to validate products early. Cloud rules provide certainty on how to design for scale from day one. That clarity removes friction that used to slow founders down, especially around access, timelines, and early-stage risk.

This is where banking-as-a-service (BaaS) becomes a practical advantage. BaaS allows startups to offer regulated banking capabilities through application program interfaces (APIs) while relying on licensed institutions and compliant infrastructure underneath. Accounts, wallets, payments, lending, and related services become modular components that teams can plug in, test, and improve quickly. The effect is that fintech begins to behave more like a software build, with faster prototyping and clearer compliance pathways. In Saudi Arabia, where the banking system is strong but has traditionally been heavy to access for new entrants, BaaS lowers early hurdles and shortens the path between a good idea and a working launch.

You can see this infrastructure phase forming through platforms designed for many founders to use, not just one at a time. The sandbox recently unveiled by Jeel, the digital innovation arm of Saudi Arabia’s Riyadh Bank, is a useful marker. It provides a shared environment where fintechs can validate products securely, starting with testing APIs and progressing toward wallet-as-a-service and, over time, full banking-as-a-service capabilities. It runs on cloud-native, composable foundations aligned with Saudi cloud regulations, and the partnership it has engineered with Mambu—the global cloud-native core banking platform that I lead in the Middle East—brings a modular core banking layer into that environment. The point to note though is what shared infrastructure allows the market to do. When the distance between a founder’s first build and a compliant launch compresses, speed becomes a competitive advantage for a wider set of teams, and markets that get cheaper to experiment in are the ones that tend to produce category-defining companies.

So, what might the next Saudi unicorn look like? Most likely a founder-led business that treats BaaS rails as a starting point and uses that head start to solve a Saudi-sized problem at speed. The opportunities are already visible if you follow the country’s economic direction. Embedded finance inside sectors expanding quickly across the Kingdom, such as logistics, tourism, and real estate. SME services designed around real cash flow patterns rather than imported templates. Cross-border products tied to trade and mobility corridors Saudi Arabia is strengthening. Digital Islamic finance that preserves its principles while delivering a modern, simple experience. These are ambitious plays, and they become far more achievable when the rails underneath are shared, compliant, and built to scale.

Unicorns appear when the conditions for extreme scale are assembled well. Saudi Arabia is doing that work through clearer regulation, a steady sandbox on-ramp, cloud-aligned platforms, and modular banking foundations that founders can build on rather than rebuild. As those pieces settle, investors see cleaner paths to scale, talent sees harder problems worth attempting, and founders start higher up the curve.

Saudi Arabia will keep producing strong consumer fintech products, and the market will benefit from them. Yet, the companies that define the next decade are likely to emerge from the deeper layer that makes those products possible, because that is where compounding advantage lives. Banking-as-a-service is becoming part of that layer in the Kingdom. If global fintech history is any guide, this is a moment that often precedes a market’s first infrastructure-led unicorn, powered by founders who build on the rails early, and then scale with confidence.

About The Author

Harjit Kang is the Head of the Middle East for Mambu, the world’s only true software-as-a-service cloud banking platform. Kang leads Mambu’s presence across the Middle East, overseeing commercial offerings, customer support, and regional expansion. With nearly 10 years of experience in cloud technology, he has a strong track record in building and scaling propositions tailored to the Middle East and wider EMEA market.