How does this company make money?
The bank earns a cost-plus margin each time it buys an asset and sells it on to a customer through a murabaha deal. It collects rental payments from customers using ijara lease financing. It charges wakala fees for managing Shariah-compliant investment products on customers' behalf. It also earns commissions on foreign exchange and trade finance transactions, structured as Islamic banking fees rather than interest.
What makes this company hard to replace?
A customer's existing Shariah-compliant financing contract cannot simply be moved to a conventional bank — religious restrictions make that transfer prohibited. Customers in ijara lease agreements are locked in for the full term because the contract legally requires the bank to hold ownership of the asset throughout. Public sector employees whose government salaries flow through integrated arrangements tied to their Shariah-compliant financing contracts face a particularly tangled process to leave.
What limits this company?
The Shariah supervisory board must certify each new product template before any customer can use it, and that approval process cannot be sped up the way a normal credit decision can. Even within already-approved structures, every individual murabaha deal requires the bank to separately source, value, and transfer a real asset — rather than just extending a credit line — which puts a hard cap on how fast the financing book can grow.
What does this company depend on?
The bank cannot operate without five things: the Saudi Arabian Monetary Authority's Islamic banking licence, ongoing certifications from its internal Shariah supervisory board, functioning Saudi real estate and vehicle markets to source assets for murabaha deals, correspondent banking relationships with international Islamic banks, and access to Saudi Payment System (SPAN).
Who depends on this company?
Saudi SME borrowers rely on it for Shariah-compliant working capital — without it, they would lose access to financing they are religiously permitted to use. Saudi homebuyers who cannot take conventional interest-based mortgages depend on it for halal home financing alternatives. Saudi corporate clients use it for Islamic trade finance structures when dealing in international transactions.
How does this company scale?
Shariah-compliant product templates, once certified, and the bank's digital banking infrastructure can be rolled out to more customers and branches at low extra cost. What does not scale easily is the asset side: every new murabaha deal still requires the bank to individually source, acquire, and transfer a physical asset, so the operational workload grows roughly in line with the number of deals, not faster.
What external forces can significantly affect this company?
Saudi Vision 2030 is pushing economic diversification, which creates demand for new types of Islamic financing structures in sectors the bank has not traditionally served. Global Islamic finance regulatory harmonisation could force SAMA to change local compliance standards, threatening the bank's existing certified product library. Oil price swings affect how much Saudi government bodies and corporations keep on deposit, which directly changes how much the bank has available to finance.
Where is this company structurally vulnerable?
If global Islamic finance regulators push SAMA to revise its local Shariah compliance standards, every product structure the bank's Shariah board has already certified could need to be redesigned and re-approved from scratch. Because the entire operation runs in sequence — SAMA licence first, then board certification, then asset acquisition and transfer — a change to the certification rules in the middle wipes out the validity of everything that comes after it, and no amount of capital fixes that.
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