Steve Durning, Associate Vice President at Tahaluf, the organiser of Money20/20 Middle East, and MFTA Strategic Member, joins FinTech TV’s Raghda Ibraheem on Wall Street to MENA ahead of the event’s return to Riyadh from 14 to 16 September 2026. The 2026 edition, co-organised by Tahaluf and Fintech Saudi and hosted by Saudi’s Financial Sector Development Program, the Saudi Central Bank, the Capital Market Authority and the Insurance Authority, is expected to draw more than 38,000 attendees, 600 investors and 150 startups.
Durning’s account of Saudi Arabia’s transformation is grounded in three years working in Riyadh: ambition, he says, is finally meeting reality. Electronic payments accounted for 85% of Saudi Arabia’s retail transactions in 2025, up from 79% in 2024, with the Kingdom’s national payment systems processing 14.6 billion electronic transactions, according to the Saudi Central Bank (SAMA). The number of licensed fintech companies operating in the Kingdom has more than doubled since 2022.
He explains why a platform like Money20/20 compresses roughly six months of relationship-building into three days, allowing a founder to meet a regulator, a bank and an investor within a single day, and why the measure that matters is not footfall but what happens afterward. He also sets out the three questions international fintech leaders bring to Saudi Arabia (regulation, customers, scale), the shift from AI experimentation to deployed use cases in fraud detection and financial crime monitoring, and the three themes he expects to define the next phase of regional fintech growth: AI as infrastructure, embedded finance, and cross-border payments.
Topics discussed: Saudi Arabia’s digital payments milestone, the licensed fintech landscape, public-private collaboration, Money20/20 Middle East 2026, AI deployment in banking, embedded finance, cross-border payments infrastructure.