Saudi Central Bank extends tokenized commercial-bank money experimentation into collateral workflows
A November 16 SAMA speech publicly paired a live multi-party tokenized-deposits test with blockchain-based collateral pledging automation, widening the Saudi Arabia story from settlement modernization alone to broader market-infrastructure workflow design.
Key takeaways
- • By then, the strongest official public evidence showed that SAMA had disclosed two distinct Innovation Hub proofs of concept: a blockchain project to automate collateral pledging and a live multi-party test of tokenized commercial-bank money.
- • It broadens the Saudi narrative from generic modernization rhetoric into named workflow experimentation across both settlement and collateral.
- • The signal remains medium rather than high because SAMA did not publish participant names, legal architecture, eligible asset scope, integration points, or a launch timetable.
Trigger
SAMA Governor Keynote Speech At The Opening Ceremony Of SAMA-BIS Innovation Summit
On November 16, 2025, SAMA published Governor Ayman M. Al-Sayari's opening speech for the SAMA-BIS Innovation Summit. In that speech, he said SAMA's Innovation Hub had delivered a Collateral Asset Management Project that used blockchain to automate collateral pledging, and a Tokenized Deposits Project that tested both account-based and token-based models of tokenized commercial-bank money on a live, multi-party blockchain network. Read together, those disclosures move the Saudi Central Bank signal beyond a narrow bank-money pilot and toward a broader infrastructure stack that touches both the cash leg and the collateral leg.
Open source documentSN Desk view
SAMA itself has now placed collateral pledging automation and tokenized commercial-bank money inside the same official Innovation Hub disclosure. That widens the Saudi story from payments modernization to a more complete operating architecture: supervised experimentation around settlement instrument design on one side and collateral-state change on the other. This matters because SAMA had already framed 2025 as a year of core-market-infrastructure modernization. In a September 15 speech at Money20/20 Middle East, the Governor said SAMA had launched a blueprint to modernize RTGS, was upgrading check clearing toward same-day processing, and was coordinating with other regulators as institutions explore stablecoin use cases. Against that backdrop, the November disclosure reads less like isolated experimentation and more like prudential exploration of how settlement and collateral operations might evolve together inside the regulatory perimeter. It also fits SAMA's longer Project Aber lineage, where real-money DLT experimentation already involved commercial-bank participation and pledged central-bank balances.
The evidence still carries limits: there is no public disclosure of participating banks, asset classes, legal documentation, collateral eligibility rules, integration with existing Saudi market infrastructure, or production timing. The stronger read stays narrower than a rollout claim.