Two years after the country
Work on the "sarie" project, which enables real-time account-to-account P2P and B2C transfers, continued apace despite the pandemic, as digital payments volume concurrently rose, said Shanker Ramamurthy, IBM’s global managing partner in banking.
“The pandemic really accelerated adoption,” Ramamurthy said, noting that Saudi Arabia still has a strong base of predominantly cash-based consumers but COVID-19 lockdowns drove more users to digital channels for the first time.
The new service, based on ISO 20022 messaging standards, enables customers of Saudi banks to send funds of up to 20,000 Saudi riyal (US$5,300) in real time, while users of the consumer-targeted “sarie” version of the product cand send up to SAR 5,000 (US$ 660) via the web or mobile devices, according to a Wednesday press release.
The project is one of several new government-backed instant-payments services where IBM is engaged as the systems integrator working with various partners, Ramamurthy said, noting that he couldn’t disclose the names of others in the works.
“The combination of developments in cloud computing, machine learning and blockchain have recently ignited development of many instant payment schemes, and you’ll be hearing about even more soon,” he said.
Account-to-account transfer technology from Vocalink, a U.K.-based subsidiary of Mastercard, is being deployed The Clearing House’s RTP solution, Singapore’s FAST service and PromptPay in Thailand.
