Fintech Marketing in Saudi Arabia: Trust, Education, and Acquisition

2026-08-02 · 1548 words · Updated 2026-09-19 · Eclipse Advertising Agency

Fintech marketing in Saudi Arabia is not ordinary performance marketing with a financial logo on top. The product moves people's money, the regulator has written rules about how it may be advertised, and many regulated products require identity verification before regulated functionality becomes available. Ignoring regulatory, trust or onboarding requirements increases the risk of non-compliance and poor activation.

Start with the regulator, not the media plan

Depending on the activity, a Saudi fintech may fall under the Saudi Central Bank (SAMA), which supervises banks, finance companies, payment service providers and similar institutions, under the Capital Market Authority (CMA), or under another applicable framework. Securities activities such as equity crowdfunding and robo-advisory fall under the CMA, which runs its own FinTech Lab for testing capital-market business models, while debt-based crowdfunding is licensed by SAMA. Know which authority you answer to and exactly what your licence or permit covers before a single ad is written, because that determines what you are allowed to say.

For SAMA-supervised institutions, the Rules for Advertising Products and Services Provided by Financial Institutions (March 2023) set the minimum standard. Among other things, they require that:

• Ads avoid tempting, misleading or inaccurate methods and do not exaggerate a product's advantages, with terms and numbers clear, including headers and footnotes (Article 1).
• Arabic is the advertising language, except for ads aimed at non-Arabic speakers that still comply with the rules (Article 2).
• Ads include, at minimum, the institution's name and contact details, the product, main conditions, the target customer, all related fees and commissions including VAT, and, for finance products, the APR and finance term (Article 3).
• Promotional offers state how to benefit and the offer's start and end dates (Article 4).
• Anything described as free is stated in explicit terms with the target group specified (Article 7).
• Customers give written or electronic consent before receiving ads, and can easily opt out permanently (Article 11).
• What an ad promises is binding and must appear in the contract (Article 12), and the compliance function approves materials in writing before publishing (Article 15).

The rules also bar using SAMA's name or logo in advertisements (Article 5.3) while requiring a statement that the institution is subject to SAMA's supervision (Article 3.9). Treat that supervision line as fixed, compliance-approved wording, never as a badge or an implied endorsement. If you are CMA-regulated, or your product is marketed as Sharia-compliant, confirm the applicable promotion requirements with the CMA, your Sharia board and your compliance team rather than relying on general guidance, and only make a Sharia claim you can back with the relevant approval.

Trust signals that hold up

• Accurate licence status. State what you are licensed or permitted to do, by whom, in the exact form compliance has approved. A sandbox permit is not a full licence; do not blur the two.
• Security explained plainly. Say what you protect and how in one or two sentences a non-specialist understands, for example what data you store, who can see it, and how a user locks their account.
• Visible fees. A fee table on the landing page and in the app, matching the ads, answers the question most users are silently asking.
• A real complaints route. SAMA's Financial Consumer Protection Principles and Rules expect clear, accurate disclosure and a working complaints mechanism. Show where to complain.

Educate before you acquire

Poor product understanding can reduce onboarding completion and increase later complaints.

• Short explainers. A 30 to 60 second animation can show a payment flow, an instalment schedule or how funds are held, without actors or a shoot.
• Worked examples. Show one realistic scenario with every fee included, rather than a best case.
• FAQs written from support tickets. The questions your team already answers every day are the ones prospects have before they sign up.
• Retargeting with education. People who visited but did not register should see the explainer, not the same offer again.

Design the funnel around KYC

Identity verification can be a significant onboarding drop-off point; check this in your own funnel data. Marketing cannot remove KYC, but it can prepare people for it.

• Tell users before they start what they will need and roughly how long it takes.
• Explain why you ask for each item.
• Track each onboarding step as its own event so you can see exactly where people abandon, then fix the step or the message.
• Send a reminder to people who stop mid-way only if they have consented to receive it, as Article 11 requires for advertising.

Referrals and incentives within the rules

Referral programmes may be useful in finance, since a recommendation from someone you know can itself act as a trust signal, but test their performance and confirm their regulatory suitability. Keep them clean: state the reward, who qualifies, the mechanism and the start and end dates; make sure the reward in the ad is exactly what the terms deliver; and pay the reward on a meaningful action such as a completed first transaction, not on a download. Article 10 of the advertising rules prohibits sending advertisements for insurance or credit products that are not suitable for individual consumers under 18 in the Hijri calendar. Under Article 13, ads must go through the institution's official and reliable channels and/or a third party licensed by the competent authority; the institution must ensure that any third party, including creators and affiliates, complies with the rules, and it bears responsibility if they do not.

App store listings and app campaigns

For many fintechs the store listing is the real landing page. Keep screenshots, description and promotional text consistent with your approved ads and fee disclosures, and write the Arabic listing natively rather than translating the English one. Apple's App Review Guidelines (5.1.1(ix)) state that apps in highly regulated fields such as banking and financial services should be submitted by the legal entity providing the service, so plan the developer account accordingly. On the ad side, Google requires financial services verification in some countries; at the time of writing Saudi Arabia is not on its list of regions and regulators, but check the current list and each platform's financial services policy before launch.

Copy: Arabic-first, plain, and careful with promises

Write the Arabic first and adapt English from it. Use customers' own words, one idea per sentence. Words that most often cause trouble:

Measure activated users, not installs

Cost per install can look efficient while masking poor verification or activation rates. Define an activated user, such as KYC completed plus a first funded transaction, and optimise and report against that. Track install to registration, registration to verified, and verified to first transaction by channel and creative, and report these downstream outcomes alongside cost per install.

A compliance review workflow that does not stall campaigns

1. Keep a pre-approved claims library: licence wording, fee statements, security descriptions and disclaimers.
2. Brief creative from that library so drafts start compliant.
3. Route every asset, including each size and language variant, to compliance for written approval before it goes live.
4. Log approvals with the final file and date, and re-review whenever fees, terms or the offer change.
5. Agree a same-day takedown process; SAMA can require a non-compliant ad to be withdrawn within one business day of notification (Article 17).

Where to go from here

Eclipse offers digital marketing services, including paid campaign management and content creation, and animation production.

Sources: rulebook.sama.gov.sa · rulebook.sama.gov.sa · cma.gov.sa · developer.apple.com · support.google.com · cma.gov.sa · sama.gov.sa