Saudi Financial Institution Signals Tokenization Push With Virtual Assets Leadership Hire
A leading Saudi financial institution is recruiting a senior executive to head its virtual-assets and digital-innovation agenda, a move that suggests the Kingdom’s banks are preparing to turn years of blockchain experimentation into commercially viable products and infrastructure.
The Riyadh-based role, advertised through specialist recruiter Huxley, is tasked with defining a roadmap spanning tokenized assets, tokenized deposits, digital payments and distributed-ledger technology. The successful candidate would be expected to identify use cases, build business cases, lead proofs of concept from feasibility through pilot execution, and make recommendations on whether and how initiatives should scale.
The remit is as much about governance as technology. It calls for coordination across technology, risk, compliance, legal, payments, treasury, operations and commercial teams, along with engagement with regulators, fintech companies and infrastructure providers. The lead would assess implications for wallets, liquidity, reconciliation, operational controls, payment flows and settlement, while documenting pilot outcomes and approval decisions for senior stakeholders.
A Hybrid Banking-and-Blockchain Brief
The institution is seeking roughly seven or more years of experience across banking, payments, fintech, blockchain, digital assets or emerging technology. Candidates are expected to combine knowledge of regulated financial infrastructure and settlement models with hands-on exposure to tokenization, digital wallets, central bank digital currencies or related ecosystems. Experience leading complex, multi-stakeholder technology programmes is central; familiarity with smart contracts, tokenized assets and cross-border payments is considered an advantage.
From Property Titles to Tradable Digital Units
The hire also comes as Saudi Arabia advances tokenization beyond private-sector trials. In November 2025, the Real Estate General Authority said the Kingdom had completed its first tokenization of a real-estate title deed under government oversight. The asset was traded between the National Housing Company and several investors, demonstrating how a high-value property could be divided into smaller digital units linked to official real-estate records. REGA said the model could broaden participation, improve liquidity and accelerate project financing, and that technical specifications for its tokenization standards would follow in 2026.
For banks, that development creates a practical pipeline of opportunities—and control questions—around custody, investor on boarding, payment and escrow integration, asset servicing, lending against tokenized collateral, and secondary-market settlement. A dedicated virtual-assets head would provide the cross-functional ownership needed to test those models without separating innovation from compliance, risk and balance-sheet considerations.
A Longer Digital-Money Track Record
Saudi Arabia’s institutional groundwork predates the latest tokenization push. SAMA and the Central Bank of the UAE launched Project Aber in 2019 to test a jointly issued wholesale central bank digital currency for domestic and cross-border interbank settlement. The final report published in 2020 found that distributed-ledger technology could support central-bank payment systems at both domestic and cross-border levels, while emphasizing that the exercise was a proof of concept rather than a recommendation to issue a currency.
SAMA said in 2023 that it was continuing experiments focused on domestic wholesale CBDC use cases with local banks and fintech companies, assessing economic impact, market readiness and policy, legal and regulatory questions; it also stressed that no decision had been made to introduce a CBDC. Saudi Arabian Central Bank had been working with R3 on its CBDC project.
At one point in time there were discussions on the release of digital asset regulatory framework, yet this has not come to fruition.
