Salla Acquires Paylink to Boost Seamless Payment Solutions for Saudi Merchants

Abdelrahman Amr

Last updated 7-09-2026

3 min

Salla bought Paylink to bring licensed payments directly into its e-commerce platform.

Merchants could get a more “joined-up” way to handle online and in-person sales.

The broader payment stack includes POS, multiple currencies and future “smart POS” tools.

Paylink’s regulated infrastructure gives Salla a valuable foothold in compliant Saudi payments.

Salla aims to help merchants get paid, manage growth and expand abroad.

Saudi e-commerce platform Salla has moved to deepen its payments play with the acquisition of Paylink, a Saudi fintech licensed by the Saudi Central Bank to provide e-commerce payment services. It is one of those deals that looks quite straightforward on paper, but in practice it could save merchants a lot of faff.

The idea is simple enough. By bringing Paylink’s regulated payment infrastructure into its own platform, Salla is no longer stopping at online storefronts and basic operations. It is extending further into financial services, covering both digital and in-person sales channels. For merchants, that could mean a more joined-up way to handle payments without hopping between too many systems.

Under the combined setup, businesses using Salla are expected to access a broader payment stack, including online transactions, point-of-sale payments and, in time, smart POS tools such as SoftPOS. Paylink also supports multiple currencies, international sales and different payment methods, which matters quite a lot for sellers eyeing customers beyond Saudi Arabia. At Arageek, we often see founders in the region get stuck on payments just when growth starts to pick up, so moves like this tend to feel spot on.

Salla said this step fits into a wider strategy of building financial services directly around merchant needs rather than leaving payments as a separate add-on. Nawaf Hariri, Founder and CEO of Salla, said financial services are “a natural extension of this vision”, adding that the acquisition should help the company create more integrated payment tools for merchants selling inside and outside the Kingdom.

There is also a regulatory angle here, and believe it or not, that may be one of the most valuable parts of the deal. Paylink carries the “Saudi Tech” designation, and its technical and regulatory infrastructure gives Salla a direct position in licensed payments. In a market where compliance can be a headache, that is not a small thing.

Salla says it now serves more than 65,000 active subscriber stores, with total sales volume above SR45 billion. That scale gives some weight to the company’s push into embedded finance. I reckon this is where a lot of commerce platforms in the region want to go next: not just helping merchants sell, but helping them get paid, manage cash flow and expand abroad without too many moving parts.

That said, one detail in the wider material around the announcement feels a bit muddled. It mentions approvals allowing the fintech to expand beyond buy now, pay later services, and also describes the company as a spinoff from BIM Ventures focused on Shariah-compliant digital microfinance for individual borrowers. Those points do not seem to neatly match the rest of Paylink’s profile as a payments infrastructure provider, so there may be more context still to come there.

Even so, the main picture is clear enugh. Salla is widening its reach from commerce tools into regulated payments, and Paylink gives it the rails to do that across online and offline transactions. On the flip side, integrating payments more deeply into commerce platforms can be tricky if execution slips. But if it works, Saudi merchants could end up with a smoother path to take money from customers at home and abroad — and in this market, that is no small win.

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