SADAD Payment System (SADAD) was established by the Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency (SAMA) to be the national Electronic Bill Presentment and Payment (EBPP) service provider for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA). The core mandate for SADAD is to facilitate and streamline bill payment transactions of end consumers through all channels of the Kingdom’s Banks.  SADAD was launched on October 3rd, 2004.

History & Background

SAMA has mandated that all banks must accept bill payments at their branches whether the person paying is (banked or unbanked) "i.e. he/she does not need to be a customer of the bank where the bill is being paid."

Pre-SADAD economics of bill payment placed an unduly large burden on banks, it was inefficient and slow. Banks also recovered a small portion of the cost through keeping the collected money for varying periods of 7-30 days after the bill was paid.

Approximately 60-70% of bills are currently paid in cash at bank branches. Due to the high number of bills generated in the Kingdom, this results in high costs for banks in front office, payment processing, IT integration and reconciliation. In addition, consumers queue for a long time at banks’ front office desks before paying their bills. Bill presentment and collection is largely manual and paper-based creating significant inefficiencies and overheads for billers and banks.

Large billers have concluded bilateral agreements with banks in order to enhance bill payments collection. This enables consumers to use their bank channels to view and pay bills (without any bill consolidation). Therefore, it is required from every biller to connect to the 12 different banks operating in KSA and from banks to connect separately to every biller they are under contract with.

SAMA works to rationalize all these connections through SADAD which is a single platform that link different billers and banks to enable the consumers to use the electronic channels of any bank.

SADAD is now facilitating the payment of; high volume periodic/repetitive bills (e.g. utility bills, phone bills etc), and customer initiated payments, such as traffic fines etc.