Salla acquires Paylink to put the payment rail under its storefronts

RIYADH — Salla, the Saudi e-commerce enablement platform, has acquired Paylink, a SAMA-licensed payments company founded in 2017 by Ammar AlTwaijri and Abdulelah Alsayegh. Terms were not disclosed. Wamda reports the deal adds payment acceptance across online and physical channels, SoftPOS, multi-currency and international payments to Salla’s stack.

Undisclosed stays undisclosed. What is disclosed is the shape: the Kingdom’s closest thing to Shopify now owns the rail that its merchants’ money runs on. That is the commerce-to-fintech land grab in its purest form.

What it prices in: Salla is betting that merchants will take payments from the same company that runs their store, and that owning the licence is worth more than renting it. Merchant lending and POS hardware are the obvious next moves once the acceptance layer is in-house.

Who loses: standalone Saudi payment service providers that counted Salla merchants as a channel. Their addressable market just shrank by the size of Salla’s base. Watch for the next Saudi commerce platform to answer with a licence of its own.

Source: Wamda