Salla buys Saudi fintech Paylink to expand payments

Salla, the Saudi Arabia-based e-commerce platform, has acquired Paylink, a Saudi fintech company that provides electronic payment solutions to businesses and merchants. The two companies did not disclose the financial terms. Salla announced the purchase in a press release and framed it as part of a wider effort to build out financial services and payment capabilities.

Paylink was founded in 2017 by Ammar AlTwaijri and Abdulelah Alsayegh. It operates under a license from the Saudi Central Bank for e-commerce payments and carries the 'Saudi Tech' label. The company has developed specialized technical infrastructure for electronic payment solutions in Saudi Arabia. That infrastructure was built to support multiple currencies, a variety of payment methods, and international sales cases.

Inside Salla, Paylink's technology will become the payments layer of an e-commerce ecosystem that already serves tens of thousands of merchants. Salla plans to integrate the infrastructure, then use it to develop payment acceptance and management tools for both online sales channels and physical stores. The company also intends to expand its point-of-sale offering, including SoftPOS, software that lets a merchant turn a phone or tablet into a card terminal.

Part of the rationale is cross-border. Paylink's infrastructure can handle international payments, and Salla plans to use it to support merchants who sell to customers outside Saudi Arabia as well as those inside the kingdom. The same infrastructure accepts multiple currencies and works across different payment methods, so a Salla merchant can present localized payment choices instead of forcing international buyers through a single gateway. That gives Salla a route to regional growth without asking merchants to assemble their own payment providers.

Nawaf Hariri, founder and CEO of Salla, said the company's goal is to enable merchants to build and grow their businesses through an integrated ecosystem, and that financial services are a natural extension of that goal. He said the acquisition gives Salla new capabilities for building payment products and lets merchants receive payments both locally and internationally. He also pointed to the fit between Salla's commerce expertise and Paylink's technical and regulatory expertise.

Salla said the acquisition is designed to support merchants at different business stages, from early-stage sellers to larger brands that want to expand beyond Saudi Arabia. The company described the deal as continued investment in the infrastructure for the future of commerce, with the intention of helping Saudi brands grow at home and enter regional markets.

The practical effect is that Salla now owns the regulated payment rails its merchants will transact on. Paylink's SAMA license is central to that: it gives Salla a supervised base for payment processing in Saudi Arabia, one that can be extended to SoftPOS and international transactions. With the payments infrastructure embedded in the commerce platform, transaction data and merchant management sit in the same place. The deal positions Salla to keep building financial services around that base rather than paying an outside processor for access.