Saudi Arabia's open finance framework widens beyond banking

Saudi Arabia's central bank has moved to extend its open-data framework beyond banking into the broader financial perimeter — insurance, lending, payments, and investment accounts. The distinction sounds technical. It is structural.

Open banking, as implemented across the Gulf, compels banks to expose account data on customer consent. It is a meaningful intervention, but a bounded one: it concerns the data held by one type of institution. Open finance widens the perimeter. It asks not only banks but insurers, lenders, payment providers, and brokerages to make customer data portable. The effect is to make a consumer's full financial life — not just their current account — available to a third party with consent.

The reason this is harder is that the perimeter is wider and the participants more varied. A bank has a single regulator and a standardised ledger. An insurer does not. A payments company's data model differs from a brokerage's. Producing a common consent and data-sharing standard across that heterogeneity is a materially larger technical and regulatory task than doing so for banks alone.

The payoff, if it lands, is larger too. The use cases that open banking struggled to generate — switching, underwriting on cash-flow data, consolidated financial management — become more powerful when the data spans the full financial relationship rather than a single account. A lender underwriting a small business is far better served by access to its insurance, payments, and treasury data than by its bank statement alone.

Saudi Arabia is not the first jurisdiction to attempt open finance — several have — but it is among the first in the region to move the perimeter deliberately rather than waiting for the banking regime to mature. The framework will take years to function. The direction is the signal: the kingdom intends data portability to be a property of its financial system, not a feature of its banks.