The Saudi Central Bank SAMA released the Annual Performance Report of the Saudi Finance and Real Estate Refinance Companies Sector for the year 2023.
The report highlighted the sector’s developments and financials “during 2023, where the paid-up share capital for finance companies sector increased by 6% to SAR 15.5 billion, total assets by 13% to SAR 64.2 billion, and total finance portfolio by 12% to SAR 84.7 billion.”
The report also highlighted that the Net income of finance companies sector “stood at SAR 1.7 billion. Likewise, the total assets of the real estate refinancing sector witnessed an increase of 48%, reaching SAR 31 billion.”
In terms of loan portfolio classification, the retail sector “accounted for the largest share at 77%, followed by MSME sector 20%, and the corporate sector at 3%.”
By the end of 2023, the number of employees (male and female) working “in finance companies exceeded six thousand employees where Saudis accounted for 86% of the total number of employees.”
The Annual Performance Report of the Saudi Finance and Real Estate Refinance Companies Sector 2023 is available on SAMA’s website.
In other updates, it was noted that as part of the Saudi Central Bank’s (SAMA) pursuit to build a robust and innovative cross-border payments infrastructure in collaboration “with various international financial institutions and central banks, SAMA has joined the Bank for International Settlements’ (BIS) mBridge project as a participant in the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) platform.”
The MVP platform is “a multi-central bank digital currency (Wholesale CBDC) system that aims to facilitate cross-border payments between commercial banks in different jurisdictions. It is considered the first multi-wCBDC platform to reach the MVP phase of development.”
SAMA has been investigating the potential “of wholesale CBDC, through the analysis of policy-related issues, to evaluate the feasibility of using wholesale CBDC to boost the effectiveness of cross-border payment and settlement between commercial banks.”
In October 2020, the G20 during Saudi Arabia’s presidency agreed “on a roadmap to enhance global cross-border payments, aiming to facilitate cheaper, faster, more inclusive and more transparent payment transactions.”
The roadmap called for an evaluation of “the proposed local designs for the digital currency of several central banks and experimentation with its use in settling cross-border payments.”
