Money20/20 Middle East day two: mada meets HIMYAN live on stage

Editorial Calendar Money20/20 Middle East day two: mada meets HIMYAN live on stage The Saudi and Qatari central bank governors put the first HIMYAN card payment through the mada network in front of the room. barq closed a $329.5m round at a $1.85bn valuation, Visa was certified for SAMA’s e-commerce interface and two Saudi payment firms went live on domestic financial crime tooling. Tuesday was about capability switching on rather than being promised.

The second day ofMoney20/20 Middle Eastproduced the most consequential item of the show so far, and it was not a memorandum of understanding.The Saudi Central BankandQatar Central Bankannounced an agreement enabling the cross-border use of the two countries’ national payment cards, mada in Qatar and HIMYAN in Saudi Arabia. The two governors then put the first HIMYAN card payment through the mada network in Saudi Arabia themselves. H.E.

Ayman M. Al-Sayari, Governor of SAMA, andH.E. Sheikh Bandar bin Mohammed bin Saoud Al-Thani, Governor of the Qatar Central Bank, made the transaction on Tuesday afternoon.

Acceptance will be introduced gradually, once the technical and operational integration between the two schemes is complete. This is a switch-on with a runway attached rather than an overnight change. What makes it significant is what a domestic card scheme is: the most sovereign piece of retail payments infrastructure a country builds, tied to its own settlement rails, fee structures and supervisory reach.

Agreeing reciprocal acceptance between two of them is a harder negotiation than opening a QR corridor, because each central bank has to accept the other’s rules inside its own acceptance network. Doing it live shows how far the technical work has already gone. The regulator’s count Al-Sayari had opened the Executive Summit earlier in the day with the numbers behind the sector.

Saudi Arabia had 371 fintech companies by the