Southeast Asia's SME Lending Playbook Is More Relevant to Saudi Arabia Than Most People Realise - FINTECH.TV

Anshul Johri, Group Chief Technology Officer at Validus Investment Holdings, told Money20/20 Riyadh audiences that Southeast Asia’s playbook for SME lending offers direct lessons for Saudi Arabia — and that his first 36 hours on the ground “completely changed” his view of the market. Johri, who spent a decade building SME and consumer finance products and scaling digital technologies for multiple unicorns in Southeast Asia, argued the central challenge for lenders is not capital but finding and engaging the right small and medium-sized enterprises.

"The biggest takeaway was not the availability of finance," Johri said on a supply chain finance panel that included representatives from Mastercard MENA and Lulu Finance. "The biggest takeaway was — how do you reach the SME who needs the money?"

Why access matters more than capital

Johri arrived in Riyadh to speak and to study parallels between Southeast Asian markets such as Indonesia, Vietnam and Thailand and the Gulf Cooperation Council landscape. He said the most striking difference was the scale and speed of government-led infrastructure and policy in Saudi Arabia, particularly initiatives to create digital commerce platform ecosystems that allow SME data to flow directly to lenders.

• Johri emphasized that small business owners "do not wake up thinking about credit scoring. They wake up thinking about how to fund payroll, how to take more inventory to get more business."
• He pointed to practical solutions: connecting to government APIs, banking API systems and invoicing systems, and using technology to identify and proactively approach creditworthy SMEs before they apply.
• Onstage alongside representatives from Mastercard MENA and Lulu Finance, Johri argued that the conversation should shift from sourcing capital to improving discovery and distribution channels to reach SMEs.

That approach mirrors strategies already tested in Southeast Asia, where platforms and fintechs have integrated with commerce and accounting systems to build rich behavioural datasets for underwriting. Johri said Saudi Arabia is adopting those lessons, but at a different scale: "I was reading about how the Saudi government is creating a digital commerce platform ecosystem for SMEs, integrating and using digital commerce data to lend them. This is something we have seen in Southeast Asia as well."

Details from the panel

During the session, Johri and his co-panellists explored how technology intermediaries can sit between government systems and lenders to surface SMEs that qualify for products such as supply chain finance. The proposed playbook is straightforward: plug into public and private APIs, build real-time signals from invoicing and commerce platforms, then proactively present financing offers to identified SMEs rather than waiting for them to seek credit.

Johri highlighted that capital availability was largely a solved problem in many markets; the harder task is operational: "When an SME wakes up in the morning, they do not wake up thinking about credit scoring."

Outlook

As Saudi Arabia continues to deploy digital infrastructure and government-led data integrations, Johri’s view suggests a near-term opportunity for fintechs and incumbent lenders to replicate Southeast Asian integration models at scale. If lenders can successfully connect to government and commerce APIs and automate outreach to creditworthy SMEs, the region could accelerate SME access to working capital — shifting the constraint from funding to distribution and underwriting intelligence.