The Saudi Central Bank (SAMA) announced that the number of Points of Sale (PoS) terminals inside the kingdom have exceeded the 1 million mark.
These terminals can be found at commercial sales outlets in more than 180 cities and villages, SAMA said, attributing the achievement to a plan that was implemented in coordination with the financial sector during the past few years.
Saudi media reports said the kingdom made large investments to develop the payments infrastructure and improve the regulatory frameworks with the aim of stimulating the private sector towards expanding, innovating and offering financial services to new stakeholders.
These measures should directly contribute to realize an important objective of the Financial Sector Development Program, a Saudi Vision 2030 program, scheduled to reach 70 percent digital payments by 2025, the reports said.
Furthermore, the efforts deployed by “Saudi Payments” in terms of developing and operating the infrastructure and enabling financial institutions to provide the latest digital payment technologies have had a significant impact on this achievement as one of the contributing partners in this vital and important sector for the advancement of payments.
Ziad Alyousef, Deputy Governor for Development and Technology, the increase in PoS comes together with a significant growth in transactions through these terminals by 80 percent, translated into the number of PoS terminal transactions reaching more than 5 billion by the end of 2021, compared to 2.8 billion transactions in 2020.
Alyousef said several factors contributed to these increases, such as the cooperation with government entities to provide digital payment options in various commercial sectors, the public awareness on the importance of digital payments, the increase in the number of companies providing payment services, enabling the licensing process at the beginning of 2020, as well as the provision of new services, such as Mobile Payments and Soft PoS.