Fina secures US$75m Fasanara facility for Saudi SME working capital

Fina, the embedded finance platform within Saudi business-to-business ecosystem SILQ, has secured a US$75m Shariah-compliant facility from Fasanara Capital to expand working-capital financing for small and medium-sized enterprises across Saudi Arabia.

The SAR282m facility will support finance delivered through the digital systems merchants already use to buy, sell, collect payments and manage their operations. It gives Fina institutional funding capacity to increase origination without requiring businesses to enter a separate lending process.

SILQ was formed through the combination of Saudi wholesale marketplace Sary and South Asian commerce platform ShopUp. Its Saudi ecosystem brings together commerce, payments, business operations and working capital, allowing finance to be offered using transaction data generated within the platform.

The group said its Saudi network has supported more than 50,000 businesses and processed over SAR20bn of transactions. Fina is targeting SAR3bn of liquidity for more than 2,000 companies this year, after deploying SAR1.5bn during the previous 12 months. Those figures are company targets and reported platform volumes rather than independently audited market totals.

Mohammed Aldossary, founder and chief executive of SILQ Financial, said the problem for merchants was not simply access to capital, but access to funding designed around how they operate. He said Fina was built to provide finance that “moves at their speed” and sits within their existing digital workflows.

Fasanara, a London-based investment manager with approximately US$6bn under management, has developed a substantial business supplying institutional capital to fintech lenders and technology-enabled credit platforms. Its strategies include asset-based finance, receivables and data-driven private credit.

The facility combines two trends shaping Gulf working-capital markets: the expansion of non-bank institutional funding and demand for structures compatible with Islamic finance principles. Embedded distribution can reduce customer acquisition and processing costs, while access to commerce and payment data can support underwriting and portfolio monitoring.

The arrangement does not remove credit risk, and performance will depend on the quality of Fina’s underwriting, collections and merchant data. Its scale and defined liquidity target nevertheless make the facility a material development in Saudi Arabia’s growing alternative working-capital market.