One of the more interesting problems I've worked on at Aion Digital was building a point-of-sale financing flow for Saudi National Bank — letting a customer request financing for a purchase without ever having to walk into a branch or fill out a traditional loan application.
The shape of the flow ended up being:
- Connect. The customer links their bank account through open banking, right from the checkout journey.
- Verify. Identity is confirmed through Nafath and Yakeen, so we know who we're lending to before we look at a single document.
- Assess. We pull the customer's open banking data and check it against the requested financing amount to determine eligibility — in real time, not after a multi-day back-office review.
- Collect. Any supporting documents the underwriting policy requires are gathered digitally.
- Approve. The quotation is routed to a relationship manager in a back-office portal, who reviews and approves the loan before it's disbursed.
A few things stood out while building this:
- Open banking data is only as useful as the eligibility logic built on top of it. The integration itself (pulling transaction history, balances, income patterns) is the easy part. The hard part is turning that into a fast, defensible eligibility decision that a relationship manager can trust enough to approve quickly.
- Identity verification has to happen before anything else is worth doing. Wiring Nafath and Yakeen in early meant every downstream step — eligibility, document collection, approval — could assume a verified identity rather than re-checking it.
- Embedded finance is a workflow problem as much as an API problem. The APIs (open banking, identity, core banking) are necessary but not sufficient. The real product is the orchestration between them and the human approval step at the end — get that sequencing wrong and the "instant" financing experience stops feeling instant.
This is the kind of problem I like most: several third-party systems that don't know about each other, a regulated approval step that can't be skipped, and a customer who just wants an answer in seconds. If you're building something similar, I'd like to hear about it.