subsidiaries

neotek, one of alrajhi group’s newest fintech subsidiaries, was established to support Saudi Arabia’s digital transformations by developing unique market-focused solutions, innovative data products, and modern financial infrastructure. The subsidiary provides secure and reliable access to real-time data processing, Open Banking services, payment entablement, and Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) capabilities, empowering financial and non-financial institutions of all sizes, from corporates to SMEs. During the reporting year, neotek focused on scaling its platform and accelerating the deployment of its offerings across the financial sector, entering 2025 with regulatory approval from SAMA in the ‘Regulatory Sandbox’, which enables innovation within a secure and regulated environment.

The fintech sector in Saudi Arabia has advanced rapidly in 2025, supported by Vision 2030, the National Fintech Strategy, and growing regulatory clarity around financial innovation. Against this backdrop, neotek leveraged its early regulatory engagement to actively participate in ecosystem-wide discussions and position itself as a trusted innovation infrastructure provider in the market. These efforts resulted in the continued advancement of neotek’s role as a strategic enabler of the Kingdom’s digital financial ecosystem.

Operational progress and strategic achievements

While contributing towards the overall ‘harmonize the group’ strategy by standardising and unifying financial technology and data solutions across group entities, neotek is also guided by its own independent strategy, progressing beyond the foundational and establishment phase to focus on becoming a leader in the fintech industry through three strategic pillars:

neotek focused on both: internal strategy, and broader group strategy, significantly expanding its capacity as a datahub, enriching its analytics with additional data sources beyond banks, and advancing normalisation and categorisation capabilities. This ability to provide richer, more contextual data enabled a comprehensive 360-degree financial view of individuals, SMEs and corporates, while simultaneously scaling a broader suite of data-driven services to support banks, financial institutions, and corporates to provide more accurate decisions.

Achieving live connectivity with all commercial banks in the Kingdom in 2025 was a major milestone for neotek. Integration complexities in connecting multiple banks and partners with varying legacy systems and readiness levels were addressed by adopting a clear methodology and an advanced integration process, with robust documentation, sandboxes and reusable components to streamline onboarding.

The reporting period saw neotek process over 30 million data sets, three times its 2024 volume. The subsidiary also became one of the most comprehensive API providers in Saudi Arabia, providing reliable data services that support various use-cases (i.e. from onboarding transformation and application automation, to processing critical requests). These unique offerings enables neotek to verify key information through trusted sources, enhancing the foundational data, decision-making processes, and financials workflows of clients.

Another significant highlight of 2025 is the expansion of neotek’s active partner ecosystem to over 20 collaborators across various industries during the year, including financial institutions, governmental institutions, insurance companies, technology providers, key leading enterprises, and several others. The subsidiary was able to turn these partnerships into functioning infrastructure, shifting from memoranda of understanding (MoUs) to live integrations in 2025, powering real market use cases.

Through these milestone achievements in 2025, neotek demonstrated significant operational strength and strategic depth, and became increasingly recognised not only as a provider of open banking services, but as a multi-layered financial technology infrastructure that delivers reliable data, enterprise-level financial services, and scalable innovative digital solutions aligned with the Kingdom’s digital transformation vision.

An expanding product portfolio

In 2025, neotek not only grew its existing offerings, but expanded its live portfolio from 6 products in 2024 to more than 18 services and products across its strategic pillars at the close of the reporting year. neotek scaled Account Information Services (AIS) through Open Banking across all commercial banks, and launched innovative offerings to address identified market needs, including income and financial analytics and enriched transaction insights used for onboarding, credit decisioning, and risk scoring.

Strengthening its role as a financial infrastructure provider, neotek also expanded its offering to provide BaaS solutions, enabling partners to embed accounts, payments, and financing features directly into their own customer journeys.

2025 also witnessed neotek focus on building a strong technical foundation and regulatory compliance for Payment Initiation Services (PIS) and embedded payment capabilities, in alignment with SAMA’s Open Banking payments roadmap. The product roadmap successfully progressed from concept to market-ready architecture in 2025 as scheduled, setting the stage for expansion readiness in the beginning of 2026.

Qaema Accounting Solution, a core application developed by neotek to simplify financial management and accounting processes for SMEs continued to evolve into a fully integrated SME financial platform in 2025, and is positioned among the fastest-growing platforms in KSA. Merchant adoption doubled to over 13,000 merchants, supported by deeper open banking integrations, improved cash-flow insights, and the introduction of Qaema Banking to support SMEs with easy access to banking needs. These developments underscored Qaema’s role as a growing contributor to the group’s broader SME strategy.

Governance, risk and compliance

In 2025, neotek maintained strong focus on governance and regulatory adherence as a one of its strongest fundamentals. The subsidiary achieved full compliance with the SAMA Cybersecurity Framework (Maturity Level 3) during the reporting period, and secured both ISO/IEC 27001 certification for Information Security Management Systems, and ISO 22301 certification for Business Continuity Management. Participation in SAMA’s Open Banking Framework was secured with approval of the use cases, enabling wider regulatory engagement. Internally, the subsidiary enhanced risk registers, strengthened oversight mechanisms, and embedded a consistent governance lens across all new products and partnerships.

Talent and organisation development

In a competitive fintech labour market, neotek continued to build teams and invest in people during the year in review. Employee engagement was continuously facilitated and encouraged through monthly engagement-focused activities and on-going feedback collection. Recognition programmes acknowledging employee performances and contributions further improved morale as the subsidiary scaled. Notably, neotek maintained a Saudisation rate exceeding 90%, reflecting its strong commitment to developing and empowering local talent.

A key 2025 milestone was progressing from ad-hoc training to a more structured learning and development ecosystem. Performance management was further refined with clearer goal-setting, structured objectives and key results, supported by frequent check-ins to ensure individual progress is aligned with neotek’s growth agenda. Ongoing capability-development is now carried out via targeted training, external certifications, participation in industry events and internal knowledge-sharing sessions. Recruitment efforts were supported by a strong employer value proposition centred around innovation, purpose-driven work under the renowned alrajhi group umbrella, and a modern, product-led culture. Talent scarcity in specialist fields such as open banking engineering, cybersecurity and data science was addressed by building a strong internal talent pipeline through targeted hiring and training, backed by a structured performance and career-development framework.