Lean secures Saudi Arabia’s first open banking license

Saudi Arabia has moved open banking from sandbox testing into formal regulation, with Lean Technologies becoming the first company to receive a Major Payment Institution license from the Saudi Central Bank to provide open banking services in the Kingdom. For banks, lenders and fintechs, that turns open banking into a licensed infrastructure layer rather than a pilot initiative.

What changes now that open banking is licensed?

The main change is regulatory certainty. A full license gives financial institutions and enterprise partners a clearer basis to build products around customer-permissioned financial data, with less ambiguity than under a sandbox model.

For Lean, the milestone formalises a position it had already built operationally. The company says it connected more than 1 million bank accounts and analysed more than 1 billion transactions during its sandbox phase. That gives it a meaningful head start in integrations, data normalisation and compliance execution.

Why does this matter for lenders and fintechs?

The clearest commercial use case is underwriting. Open banking gives lenders access to verified cash-flow data, which can improve affordability checks and support decisions on customers who may be harder to assess through traditional credit models alone.

Lean says its infrastructure has identified more than SAR 37 billion in salaried income and SAR 14 billion in non-salaried income across the Kingdom. That matters in a market where freelancers, gig workers and customers with multiple income streams are not always well served by legacy credit systems.

Tamara provided one of the strongest examples in the release, saying Lean’s data infrastructure helped increase approval rates by more than 32% in a newer consumer finance product by improving solvency assessment.

Is Saudi Arabia treating open banking as core financial infrastructure?

That is increasingly the direction of travel. This license is not just a company milestone; it is also a regulatory signal that Saudi Arabia wants open banking to become part of the financial system’s operating layer.

Lean’s Saudi partnerships, including Tabby, Tamara, Abdul Latif Jameel, Sukuk and Tasheel, suggest open banking is already being applied across BNPL, consumer finance, automotive, investment and public-service-linked use cases. The next question is how quickly the market expands beyond early adopters into broader institutional use.

What should the market watch next?

The next phase is commercial scale. The key indicators will be whether more lenders adopt open-banking-based underwriting, whether additional providers enter the licensed market, and whether use cases expand from account information into wider onboarding and payment workflows.

Why This Matters to FinanceX Readers

For finance professionals, this is a regulatory infrastructure story more than a funding or product launch story. Saudi Arabia has now given open banking a formal licensing path, which lowers execution risk for banks, lenders and fintechs building on customer-permissioned data. For investors and operators, the key takeaway is that monetisable use cases such as underwriting, onboarding and SME credit assessment are moving closer to regulated scale in one of the Gulf’s most closely watched fintech markets.