Saudi mada and Qatar's Himyan cards become cross-accepted at Money20/20

RIYADH — Saudi Arabia's SAMA and the Qatar Central Bank have announced reciprocal acceptance of the mada and Himyan national payment cards in both countries, The Peninsula reports, with governors Ayman Al-Sayari and Sheikh Bandar bin Mohammed bin Saoud Al-Thani running the first Himyan payment through the mada network on stage at Money20/20 Middle East in Riyadh.

The link builds on the August 2022 mada-NAPS connection via GCC-NET and extends the shared Gulf payment-infrastructure project at the card-scheme level.

The on-stage transaction between the two governors was the second live link of Gulf national card schemes, after the mada-NAPS connection established through GCC-NET in 2022. Shared payment infrastructure has been one of the few areas of Gulf integration that kept moving regardless of politics, and each new bilateral link makes the regional scheme more valuable to banks and merchants.

The read: national schemes interoperating is how the GCC builds payment sovereignty without building a single currency: each card stays local, the network does the translation. Watch transaction volumes on the corridor and whether Bahrain's Benefit and the UAE's schemes join, because three linked schemes is a network, two is a bilateral.