Saudi fintech Stitch shifts focus to infrastructure as legacy systems limit scale

Saudi fintech Stitch is repositioning itself as an infrastructure play as legacy banking systems constrain the Kingdom’s digital finance ambitions, founder and CEO Mohamed Oueida told Arab News. Stitch provides a unified “financial operating system” that integrates payments, lending, accounts and data into a single layer, and the company recently closed a $25 million Series A funding round as it pushes banks and financial institutions to replace fragmented cores and reduce reliance on multiple external vendors.

“Infrastructure determines who wins,” Oueida said, arguing that the market has moved beyond “surface-level innovation.”

Oueida told Arab News that while consumer-facing payments, wallets and other digital services have become mainstream in Saudi Arabia, the deeper constraint to scale and fast iteration lies in the underlying systems. “You can build a beautiful front end, but you can’t iterate, price dynamically, or embed finance deeply without control over the core,” he said. Stitch positions itself as the system of record for critical workflows and data, enabling institutions to streamline operations, improve scalability, and launch new products with fewer external dependencies.

Market context and structural limits

Industry research cited by Oueida underscores the problem. A 2025 McKinsey & Co. report found that over 70 percent of banks still rely on decades-old core systems, creating fragmented stacks that slow product development and increase costs. Deloitte’s research suggests banks with disconnected systems can take up to three times longer to launch new products compared with those using unified architectures, and Accenture reports nearly 80 percent of banking executives cite data fragmentation as the main barrier to scaling AI.

Stitch’s own research, Oueida said, shows more than 87 percent of financial institutions in Saudi Arabia rely on external vendors, while over 60 percent of institutions offering financing products continue to operate on legacy systems. “The apps get the attention. The infrastructure determines the outcome,” he added, describing the mismatch as a structural bottleneck that becomes visible only at scale.

• Stitch integrates payments, lending, accounts and data into a single operating layer.
• More than 87% of Saudi financial institutions rely on external vendors, per Stitch research.
• Over 60% of lenders in the Kingdom still operate on legacy systems, per Stitch.
• Stitch closed a $25 million Series A round as it shifts focus to infrastructure.

Outlook: AI, regulation and the path to modernization

Oueida said unified infrastructure is a prerequisite for embedding AI into operational decision-making and unlocking “quick ROI.” “Even AI then becomes highly valuable with paths to quick ROI,” he said, noting most current AI use-cases are limited to fraud detection, credit scoring and analytics until data is unified. He warned that “execution breaking once scale kicks in” is a common challenge: “A pricing change, a regulatory update, or a new distribution partner suddenly turns into a multi-year project.”

Regulatory moves by the Saudi Central Bank, including open banking frameworks and real-time payments, and growing cloud adoption have created momentum, but institutional inertia and the need to modernize “without disruption” remain concerns. “Trust is earned at the intersection,” Oueida said. “A strong product opens the door, but doesn’t close the deal. Compliance is table stakes.”

As Saudi Arabia’s financial sector matures under Vision 2030, Stitch’s strategy bets that control over the core — not the consumer app layer — will determine which players scale successfully. “The question shifts from ‘where is this data’ to ‘how far can we go with it,’” Oueida said, framing the company’s push to make unified data the foundation for the next phase of fintech innovation in the Kingdom.