Salt Edge expands its Open Banking offering to the Saudi Arabia market
Salt Edge, a global Open Banking pioneer, has announced its expansion to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, aiming to help banks and other financial institutions to bring innovative solutions to the market and contribute to the Kingdom’s efforts toward the digital rise of technologies via Open Banking.
The Saudi Central Bank (SAMA) sees Open Banking as pivotal in developing the Kingdom’s financial sector further and supporting financial inclusion in the country. On 2 November SAMA published the Open Banking Framework and mandated banks to make their account information APIs available by the end of 2022 and the payment initiation APIs by March 2023. With the deadlines right around the corner, Salt Edge’s Open Banking Compliance solution helps KSA banks to become compliant in 3 months only. Salt Edge has already developed the sandboxes for KSA banks to offer an easy way to show how it starts.
Salt Edge is a leading Open Banking services provider with 10 years’ delivering financial technology solutions for banks, credit unions, lenders, accounting companies, fintechs, and anyone who wants to leverage Open Banking. The company has gained valuable expertise in Europe, where Open Banking was largely adopted by the market back in 2019, and Salt Edge has helped hundreds of banks and financial institutions become compliant with Open Banking regulatory requirements and get connectivity to 5,000 bank channels. Among the institutions that are successfully using Salt Edge’s Open Banking solutions are Western Union, Odoo, Guaranty Trust Bank, Pleo, Byblos Bank, Ahli Bank, Habib Bank, and many others.
Understanding the incontestable importance of the Open Banking phenomenon in the KSA, Salt Edge is rolling out a set of Open Banking solutions on the Saudi market, which will help financial institutions empower consumers to share their transactional data and initiate payments via trusted fintechs for better financial outcomes. Salt Edge has built strong partnerships in the region with Finastra, Temenos, Mambu, Spire, Thought Machine, Tuum, ebankIT, and others, striving to help financial institutions innovate, grow, and deliver customer value fast.
We expect the Saudi Arabia market to embrace Open Banking at a higher pace than other regions. All the needed factors are here: a thoughtful and innovative regulator, a mandate for banks to develop their APIs based on a unique standard, and an increased demand from the market. Fintech apps, corporates, SMEs, merchants, lenders, and all kinds of financial service providers have been showing great interest to implement Open Banking-powered solutions. Now the key to succeeding in Open Banking is to educate every stakeholder about its benefits and help them build as many viable business use cases as possible, said Alina Beleuta, Chief Growth Officer at Salt Edge.
ISO 27001 certified and conformant with SAMA’s Cyber Security Framework, Salt Edge employs the highest international security measures to ensure stable and reliable connections between financial institutions and their customers. The company has onboarded onto SAMA’s Open Banking Lab and is in process of applying to SAMA’s regulatory sandbox for several use cases, partnering with both banks and fintechs in the region.
Our message to the local banks and financial players is for them to do what they do best, develop services and products to match their consumer’s expectations backed with a profitable business model, and trust Salt Edge with Open Banking compliance and connectivity, added Alina.