Visa and Tarabut Partner to Unlock Smarter Credit Decisions

Across the GCC region, banks are striving to expand credit access — especially through credit card offerings — as part of broader financial inclusion and growth strategies. Yet a major challenge remains: limited visibility into a customer’s complete financial picture, particularly when income, savings, and transaction data are spread across multiple institutions.

Open banking is transforming this landscape by enabling secure access to comprehensive financial data across banks. With the ability to tap into real-time income insights, asset information, and transaction behavior, banks can build a fuller, more accurate understanding of a customer’s creditworthiness.

That’s the visibility Visa and Tarabut are working to unlock in KSA and Bahrain. By leveraging Tarabut’s deep connectivity across Saudi and Bahraini banks and Visa’s global expertise in credit innovation, we are bridging the data gap that has long limited consumer credit growth.

Rethinking Creditworthiness: Beyond Liabilities

Consider a scenario where a customer applies for a credit card at Bank A, but their salary, savings, and active transactions are maintained with Bank B. While Bank A can access information about the customer's debt through national credit systems, it lacks visibility into the income or assets that could indicate strong financial standing.

As a result, banks often overlook creditworthy individuals because they’re operating with only half the picture.

A Smarter, More Informed Solution

To address this gap, Visa has partnered with Tarabut, a leading regulated financial technology platform specialized in embedded finance, open banking, and powering data-rich digital financial services, to introduce a bundle of innovative services for banks in KSA and Bahrain.

By combining Tarabut’s data insights products, which allow banks to securely access a customer’s financial data across multiple institutions—with Visa’s data solutions and advisory services, banks can now make more informed credit decisions.

This bundled solution offers:

• Access to total income identification and verification for salaried and non-salaried via Tarabut’s open banking technology, built on regulatory-licensed infrastructure and API connectivity across the Saudi banking ecosystem.
• Enhanced customer segmentation and risk modeling through Visa’s proprietary data analytics.
• Strategic advisory support to help banks optimize their credit issuance and underwriting strategies, enhance their policies and grow their portfolios sustainably

Driving Inclusion and Growth, Together

With this new bundle, Visa and Tarabut aim to empower banks with the tools to assess creditworthiness more holistically, enabling them to:

• Extend credit to more customers.
• Reduce default risk through better-informed underwriting.
• Streamline the onboarding and approval process with real-time financial insights.

In doing so, this helps financial institutions tap into previously underserved or overlooked segments particularly young, digitally native consumers with thin credit files.

This partnership is just the beginning. Over the coming months, Visa and Tarabut will roll out additional service bundles designed to help banks in the region accelerate their digital transformation journeys and better serve their customers in an open banking era.

These future offerings will continue to expand the value of open banking, supporting not only smarter credit decisions, but also embedded financial journeys that meet customers where they already are.

Together with Tarabut, Visa is opening a new chapter for credit innovation in the region. By combining the scale and trust of Visa with Tarabut’s leadership in open banking and data-driven infrastructure, = a new benchmark for what credit decisioning can look like in a connected financial ecosystem is being set.