Browsing by Author "Alsubhi, Daifallah Khaled"

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How Effective is Saudi Arabia's FinTech Regulatory Framework? Benchmarking Growth and Risk Against the United Kingdom
(Saudi Digital Library, 2026) Alsubhi, Daifallah Khaled; Brand, Ronald A
As the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia pursues economic diversification under Vision 2030, financial technology has become a central pillar of the Financial Sector Development Program, advanced through a national FinTech Strategy launched in 2022. This study evaluates how effectively the Saudi regulatory framework fosters the expansion of the FinTech ecosystem while it mitigates systemic and consumer risk, and it benchmarks the developing Saudi framework against the mature Twin Peaks model of the United Kingdom. Adopting a qualitative, doctrinal, and functional comparative legal methodology, it assesses both jurisdictions through a dual-pillar framework that measures regulatory effectiveness in supporting growth and in managing risk. Effectiveness is assessed primarily as a matter of regulatory design, that is, whether the framework's instruments, institutions, and coordination architecture embody sound regulatory principles; outcome evidence is used in a secondary register. The study finds that the Saudi framework is effective at balancing growth and risk. Saudi Arabia has been highly successful in promoting FinTech growth and innovation, exceeding the principal milestones of its national strategy ahead of schedule and matching or surpassing the United Kingdom on several measures, including the responsiveness of its rulemaking and the strength of its cybersecurity and financial-crime controls. Gaps nevertheless remain in customer protection, where the framework lags the mature United Kingdom standard. These gaps include the absence of a mechanism to reimburse victims of authorized push payment fraud, the lack of an enforceable good-outcomes duty that reaches customers across all regulators, and the absence of a single, independent redress mechanism. The study concludes that the framework does not require wholesale reform but targeted completion, and it offers a prioritized set of recommendations, led by a fraud-reimbursement regime, a dedicated fraud-prevention strategy, an independent redress mechanism, and a balanced scorecard of risk and consumer outcomes, designed to close these consumer-protection gaps and complete the measurement and transparency architecture while preserving the strengths that have made the Kingdom one of the fastest-moving FinTech jurisdictions in the world.
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