Business & Money | Thursday 19 February, 2015 8:04 am |

Minister of Commerce and Industry Tawfiq Al-Rabiah said the electronic payments depending on mobiles and tablets will remove other traditional payments through cash, checks, ATM and credit cards. This development will also lead to reduce the number of bank branches as there is no need to visit banks to make the same procedures.
“The Ministry of Commerce and Industry succeeded to ensure electronic applications to issue licenses and commercial records, while this step reduces the time to end this procedure,” said Al-Rabiah during the proceedings at the National Technical Forum, which was held at King Saud University on Monday.

Meanwhile, most Saudi banks have issued special apps working with smart phones to facilitate banking procedures to their clients. Several Saudis and expatriates prefer to make their own payments through their own smart phones such as paying the electricity bills or transferring money to other Saudi bank accounts.
This new electronic system reduces their time and efforts in visiting a bank branch.

“I am using my smart phones to transfer money to other Saudi bank accounts. This new electronic system reduced the time to do the same procedure at a bank branch. All Saudi banks have issued special applications on smart phones, while the users can easily download them on their mobiles and sign up to create their own accounts to do their banking procedures,” Yasser Ahmed, a Sudanese resident in Jeddah, told Arab News.

“The new banking applications on smart phones is part of the technology development, which help users to manage their affairs without obstacles. However, these applications will need a long time to replace the role of bank employees. There are still thousands of expatriates and Saudis who have no smart phones or do not know how they can deal with electronic services,” Abdullah Ajlan, director of an IT services company, told Arab News.
Around 24 percent of Saudis using mobile apps are not aware of the operating system of their smart phones, according to Arab Advisers Group’s survey of Saudi Arabia’s mobile application users that was released in June 2014.