Chairman of the CMA Says FSC reflects strength of the Kingdom’s economy

The Capital Market Authority’s (CMA’s) Chairman of the Board, H.E. Mohammed bin Abdullah Elkuwaiz announced that the Financial Sector Conference (FSC), held in Riyadh, March 15-16, is a regional and international platform that reflects the strength of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s economy, the biggest in the region, and confirms its importance as being the new core for financial services.

The conference is organized by the partners of the Financial Sector Development Program (FSDP), as being one of the executive programs of the Kingdom’s Vision 2030 represented by: Ministry of Finance, Saudi Central Bank, and Capital Market Authority. More than 3000 decision makers in the financial sector in the local and international level participated in FSC to discuss the challenges, including sector development, and facing changes through innovative ideas, dialogues and discussions, the Chairman reported. 

H.E. stressed that regarding Security Token Offerings (STOs), it must be noted that, within a short time, they had multiple uses and different forms.

Elkuwaiz says the question now is why this market has become, in no time, a trillion-dollar market with more than 300 million investors globally.

As both we develop our expertise in this field, and use cases are getting clearer, we expect to see adaptation and new regulations in this field.

In Saudi Arabia, we have witnessed rapid growth in the past five years from roughly zero to 150 companies in the FinTech sector with a value of 4 billion riyals and created more than 2000 jobs in the Saudi economy, Elkuwaiz reported.

Currently, we use many innovative businesses in the FinTech, including NFTs. Also, Security tokens are under CMA, and we launched the STO test platform in our FinTech lab, and we started to see application flows in this field which is 24%, compared to all applications received in the FinTech lab (4 applications so far). Cryptocurrencies are being looked at by the central bank.

Since the launch of Saudi Vision 2030, our aim has been to become one of the biggest financial markets globally. By listing shares of Aramco, we achieved our objective as we ranked 9th on a global level and such stresses the importance of listings expansion. Now, CMA has about 80 new offerings, Elkuwaiz concluded.

The Conference is a window through which many promising investment opportunities are provided through Saudi Vision 2030, particularly the FSDP initiatives that align with its pillars. These initiatives aim to enable financial institutions to support private sector growth, develop an advanced capital market, promote and enable financial planning to support all society groups, and support the FinTech strategy.