I am Yazeed Al-Shamsi. I solved upfront rent, which led to monthly living

Saudi Arabia’s rental market has never lacked demand. What it has lacked, Yazeed Al-Shamsi argues, is flexibility. When most landlords expect six months to a full year upfront, moving house stops being a life decision and starts looking like a liquidity event. Ejari’s promise is simple: tenants pay monthly, landlords still get the year paid upfront. The mechanism is financial, but the effect is human, easing a pressure point that hits young professionals, families, and anyone arriving in a new city.

When asked to define what he is really building, Al-Shamsi frames Ejari less as a fintech product and more as a new default for how people enter housing, with the balance of security and choice tilted back towards the tenant.

When the conversation turns to where the idea came from, Al-Shamsi traces it to a moment of personal friction as a student in the UK. Foreign students, seen as flight risk, were asked to pay annual rent upfront. He found a workaround through an insurance company that paid the landlord in full and let the student repay monthly. It was not glamourous innovation, it was a practical fix, and it stuck.

Back in Riyadh, he discovered the same pain was widespread, affecting individuals and even businesses trying to rent offices. That repetition mattered. The UK experience was the spark, but Saudi Arabia provided the proof that the problem was structural, not situational. Ejari was the decision to industrialise that workaround and localise it for the Kingdom.

Asked to explain the model without the fintech vocabulary, Al-Shamsi keeps it clean. A tenant chooses a unit. Ejari rents it from the landlord and pays the full annual amount on the tenant’s behalf. The tenant then repays Ejari in monthly instalments.

The subtlety is in what that changes. Landlords keep certainty and cash flow, without taking on monthly collection risk. Tenants get a budgetable monthly payment, instead of a large upfront barrier. Ejari sits in the middle, carrying the underwriting burden and the operational choreography that most rental markets have historically dumped on the renter.

When asked how his prior roles shaped his approach, Al-Shamsi does not romanticise corporate experience, he itemises what it gave him: structure, discipline, and a reflex for risk.

He worked at Mizuho Bank in Tokyo, then across investment banking roles in Riyadh and Dubai. Later, at Tadawul in market development for debt instruments and funds, he gained a wider view of how products behave inside regulation, how compliance is designed, and how markets absorb new financial mechanics. Together, those years built a mindset that prefers models over assumptions and governance over improvisation.

That background shows up in Ejari’s emphasis on sustainability. The promise is convenience, but the engine is a financial structure capable of paying landlords upfront without turning the business into a fragile wager.

Pressed on how Ejari assesses risk, Al-Shamsi describes a deliberately holistic system. The company does not anchor decisions on one variable, it builds a full profile: age, job type, income level, career stability, financial history, credit records, existing commitments, and observed payment behaviour over time.

He gives examples that reveal how they think. Government employment is typically lower risk due to regular salaries and continuity. Age can matter too, with over-40s often showing more consistent payment patterns as careers stabilise and obligations become more predictable. But he is careful not to oversell any one factor. The aim is an integrated prediction of default probability, produced by internal models that translate signals into a decision.

The strategic intent is clear: expand, but not carelessly. In his words, it is about “controlled risk for long-term sustainability”.

When asked whether tenants ever fail to pay, Al-Shamsi treats it as a normal feature of offering payment facilities. The point is not eliminating default, it is building a system that keeps it limited and learns quickly when it happens.

He says Ejari’s default cases have been extremely limited so far, crediting strict pre-screening and continuous refinement of evaluation processes. Minor delays are handled early through direct, flexible communication. Exceptional cases get dissected and fed back into the risk model. It is an engineering posture applied to credit: defaults become feedback loops, not existential threats.

On the question of competition, Al-Shamsi sounds unusually relaxed. He argues the market is still early, awareness is still forming, and new entrants help educate consumers and normalise flexible rental solutions.

In that context, competition is not only survivable, it is useful. It pushes innovation, raises service quality, and expands the overall category. His claim is not that rivals make life easier, but that they make the conversation easier. In a nascent market, the first battle is often explaining the product’s existence.

Asked how he measures market share in a category that is still being created, Al-Shamsi is blunt about the limits of the metric. The market is evolving, sizing is unclear, and players are shaping the structure in real time.

So he looks at directional indicators: request volumes, geographic spread, and adoption speed. Internally, the focus remains on product development, user experience, and trust. Leadership, he suggests, is an outcome of getting the basics right while the market matures, rather than a label you can credibly claim too early.

When asked what makes Ejari work at scale, Al-Shamsi points to automation and AI as the backbone, not a layer. From day one, the customer journey was built to be fully automated, from application to assessment to approval. The benefit is speed, but also data accuracy, which in turn improves decision quality.

AI sits most heavily in risk models. Instead of manual reviews or simplistic criteria, algorithms identify behavioural and financial patterns to predict default probability more precisely. For Ejari, that is how you stay flexible without becoming reckless: automation reduces friction, AI tightens underwriting, and the combination supports growth without collapsing the model.

When asked where Ejari stands today, Al-Shamsi uses scale as evidence of unmet demand. He says rental financing requests approached one billion SAR in the first two years, and the company expanded into more than 20 cities across 8 regions. The point he wants the reader to take is that this is not a niche Riyadh story. Demand is distributed, suggesting the pain is national.

He frames Ejari as more than a financing product. It is “a new model” for how society interacts with renting, with less paperwork, more predictable payments, and a smoother entry into housing.

Asked to look ahead, Al-Shamsi is optimistic about Saudi rentals, largely because he believes demographic and economic shifts will force new norms. He points to mobility, younger preferences for digital and monthly payments, and the direction of urban growth, including ambitions around Riyadh’s population scale, as drivers that will make flexibility less optional.

He expects the market to move away from paper contracts and annual payments towards tech-enabled, transparent contracting. He also sees real estate development and private sector focus on units for young individuals and small families as tailwinds. In that future, the winners are not just those who finance rent, but those who build an ecosystem around renting.

When asked about expansion, Al-Shamsi says residential remains the focus, but the roadmap extends into commercial leasing, including offices, retail, warehouses, and potentially industrial and institutional real estate with longer leases and more complex structures.

He also describes ambitions to wrap services around the rental experience: insurance, maintenance, property management, and support services that tenants naturally need. The consistent principle, he insists, will be a seamless journey, precise risk assessment, and full automation.

Pressed on how investor choice influenced the company, Al-Shamsi makes a distinction many founders learn too late. He sought backers who brought strategic value in fintech, risk, real estate, and scaling, not just capital.

That expertise helped shape risk policies, refine the product, improve customer journeys, and unlock partnerships. He describes it as steering, not cheering. Funding mattered, but direction mattered more.

Asked how Ejari attracted over $15 million, he points to a combination of market size, a clear pain point, and demonstrated execution. Investors, he says, saw a large industry with weak digital solutions, a team that could scale across cities quickly, and a roadmap that extended into supporting services and adjacent sectors.

When asked what entrepreneurship has taught him so far, Al-Shamsi’s answer is not motivational, it is operational. Ideas do not win, execution does. Endurance matters. Timing can outrank originality. Understanding the customer’s real problem is the foundation, and belief is what keeps you moving when the work becomes uncomfortable.

He speaks about entrepreneurship as a series of difficult decisions and accumulated learning, with consistency beating speed. The through-line is restraint. Build for a real daily problem, adapt quickly, and accept that progress is compounding.

Finally, when asked for advice to aspiring fintech founders, Al-Shamsi draws a hard line: fintech is not “just an app”. It requires fluency in regulation, compliance, user behaviour, and responsible product design.

He argues courage must be paired with discipline, and that advisors with deep sector experience can compress years of mistakes. Most importantly, he returns to staying close to the user, because financial behaviour changes, markets evolve, and yesterday’s model can quietly stop working.

For Al-Shamsi, Ejari’s bet is that housing should not demand a year of liquidity upfront. The bigger bet is that once monthly renting becomes normal, the Kingdom will wonder why it ever worked any other way.