neoleap

A challenging yet rewarding first year

Neoleap’s product and
service highlights for the year:

In its first full year of operation, Al Rajhi Bank’s financial digital solutions subsidiary Neoleap successfully launched urpay Digital Wallet together with a number fintech products and services, becoming the largest and fastest-growing PayTech provider in the region. The company exceeded revenue, operating income and net profit targets to end the reporting year profitably, and favourably-positioned to increase local market share in 2023.

In a fiercely competitive fintech market that ended the year with 42 companies operating under the Saudi Central Bank’s (SAMA) Regulatory Sand Box, of which 23 were fully authorised licenced payment companies, Neoleap faced intense competition when setting up and scaling multiple business verticals during the reporting period.

By offering a full spectrum of seamlessly integrated digital payment solutions and value-added services to banks, financial institutions, merchants and consumers, Neoleap carved out a rapidly growing niche in an exponentially growing fintech market, building a strong and secure fintech ecosystem, and largely contributing towards the Kingdom’s 2030 vision of a cashless society.

The subsidiary also introduced bundled fintech services for corporates, tailored based on requirement, a unique offering in the Saudi fintech market.

Technological Leadership and Operational Excellence

With the issuance of the Open Banking Framework by SAMA in November 2022, and the launch of open banking services in Saudi scheduled for Q1 of 2023, Neoleap continued to operate under the SAMA Open Banking Sandbox, securely testing product readiness to strengthen its position as the trusted, authorised Third-Party Provider (TPP) and Payment Aggregator Service Provider (PASP) of choice for banks and financial institutions.

To further strengthen the company’s digital payment offerings, Neoleap continued to build strong and secure technology stacks on its infrastructure, application, network and security layers, enhancing capabilities and enabling innovation across the payment value chain. The company also established comprehensive control and risk functions across all five business verticals to further improve on operational excellence and functionality.

Value added services

For the year under review, Neoleap focused on providing seamless in-store and online payment acceptance solutions for merchants, complementing its efforts by drastically bringing down POS installation turnaround time to 48 hours. The subsidiary also leveraged its synergies within the Group to offer merchants POS financing facilities during the year under review. Value added services were also extended during the period under review across both B2B and B2C business verticals to ensure a consistent and satisfactory customer experience through Neoleap solutions.

Attracting fintech talent

A key challenge that spilled-over from the previous year was the shortage of key technical and commercial talent in the relatively new field of fintech, and the retention of recruited fintech experts. Due to the unique nature of its mandate and potential scale of the business, Neoleap was able to position itself as an employer of choice for top fintech talent, investing in nurturing a flexible, adaptive and evolving company culture, and providing fresh recruits unparalleled opportunities to grow alongside the organisation.