Hybrid BNPL And Retail Engine
Calculates monthly installments dynamically, including Shariah-compliant Murabaha profit margins for longer tenures, and adjusts its installment logic against the maximum tenure each financing product actually allows.
Shariah-Compliant BNPL Engine and Automated Merchant Onboarding
A digital lending transformation combining hybrid Buy Now Pay Later and retail finance in Saudi Arabia, routing every transaction into the regulatory treatment its value requires while verifying merchants against national identity and commercial registration services.
Project Overview
The business is a Saudi fintech providing digital Shariah-compliant financial services to small and medium enterprises and consumers, supervised by the Saudi Central Bank. Its products span microfinance, top-up finance, autolease, virtual prepaid cards, retail finance, BNPL, point of sale financing, and business credit cards. Every product sits inside two rule sets at once, regulated consumer lending and Islamic finance. This lending platform modernization built a hybrid BNPL and retail finance engine, introduced configurable processing fees, and rebuilt merchant registration around deep national identity integrations across a multi-portal ecosystem.
Challenges
The fragmented infrastructure, lack of automation, and absence of localization features created major roadblocks in delivering a scalable, compliant lending platform for retail, SME, and BNPL segments in Saudi Arabia.
No Configurable Processing Fees
Existing BNPL transactions did not support configurable processing fees within the transaction or settlement flow, restricting commercial flexibility and pushing costs entirely onto the platform.
Off-System Fee Handling
Without on-system fee management, the business relied on inefficient manual handling outside the platform, which is untenable in a regulated lending flow requiring evidenced charges.
Manual Compliance Slows Adoption
Merchant and SME registration required rigorous verification, and without automated real-time validation of commercial registration and national identity, workflows stayed cumbersome and prone to data mismatches.
Mandatory Upfront Disclosure
Regulation dictated strict transparency, meaning any financing product carrying a profit margin had to disclose its terms upfront before a legally enforceable contract could be signed.
Two Regulatory Treatments, One Checkout
Zero-cost BNPL requires soft or no credit checks while formal retail financing mandates strict credit assessment and legal contracts, yet customers could not experience two different checkouts.
Multi-Portal Consistency
A merchant portal, an SME portal, and a marketing content system all needed shared components and state logic without three separately maintained frontends drifting apart over time.
No Real-Time Offer Simulation
The absence of a simulation engine restricted dynamic offer generation and the ability to model pricing impacts instantly—slowing decision-making for loan officers and admins.
Solution
This lending workflow automation routed transactions by value across three defined thresholds, embedded configurable processing fees directly into the BNPL settlement flow, and rebuilt merchant onboarding around sequential automated checks against Saudi national databases.
Value-Based Transaction Routing
Strict thresholds route transactions automatically, with orders below five thousand riyals running as regular BNPL and higher-value orders escalating into long-term financing or retail finance treatment.
Configurable Processing Fees
Fees were introduced directly into the BNPL transaction and settlement flow, letting the business apply and manage them transparently on-system rather than through manual off-platform workarounds.
Redesigned Onboarding Journey
Unnecessary friction was removed, including the date of birth field, and email was made optional, while sequential automated checks against Saudi national databases replaced manual verification steps.
Perimeter Fraud Prevention
Validating that a merchant's mobile number is legally linked to their commercial registration before account creation moves fraud prevention to the perimeter rather than detecting it later.
Backend-For-Frontend Layer
A hybrid BFF layer manages communication between the frontend portals and backend services, handling retail finance and BNPL installments alongside real-time anti-money-laundering and eligibility checks.
Monorepo Multi-Portal Architecture
An Nx monorepo manages the multi-portal ecosystem, letting the team share components and state logic across the merchant portal, SME portal, and marketing content system.
Features
This loan origination modernization spans hybrid financing routing, automated merchant verification against national services, configurable fee handling, legally enforceable e-contract signing, and a headless content system giving the marketing team direct pricing control.
Value Threshold Routing
Three strict value thresholds decide regulatory treatment automatically, separating regular BNPL, long-term financing, and formal retail finance with profit and processing fees applied where required.
Backend-For-Frontend Orchestration
The BFF layer holds all compliance sequencing server-side, keeping the frontend fast, decoupled from heavy regulatory logic, and safely beyond client-side manipulation of approval outcomes.
Automated Merchant Onboarding
Sequential API calls validate that a merchant's mobile number links to their commercial registration, confirm the registration is active, then retrieve the full record after verification.
National Identity Verification
A final security gate at registration triggers a national identity prompt requiring the user to verify through the official application before the account is activated.
E-Contract Digital Signing
Retail finance customers are routed to the official e-contract platform for tamper-proof, legally enforceable financing contracts, with application status polling and a physical delivery option integrated.
Merchant Integration And Orders
Unique QR codes or SMS links generate for in-store checkout, with integration credentials letting merchants check eligibility, submit financing requests, and confirm completed payments by API.
Headless Content Management
A marketing portal gives full control over financing product pricing and offers through dynamic sections and tables, consumed by the public website through read-only endpoints.
Registration Validation Gating
Strict field-level rules govern company name, identity number, phone format, and password strength, blocking progression on already-registered identities, unmet eligibility criteria, or commercial registration mismatches.
Tech Implementation
- .NET Core
- Angular
- Microsoft SQL Server
- Azure Cloud
Impact Created
Point Of Sale Financing
Merchants can now offer customers Shariah-compliant financing directly at the point of sale, reachable through both API integration for e-commerce and terminal integration for physical retail.
Off-System Handling Eliminated
This BNPL platform modernization introduced configurable processing fees, eliminating manual off-system handling entirely and aligned operational costs with transaction revenue across every financed customer order.
Commercial Flexibility Restored
On-system fee management restored the commercial flexibility the previous architecture had removed, letting the business price its products without engineering involvement in every individual change.
Manual Verification Reduced
Automated onboarding backed by sequential identity and registration integrations cut manual verification checks sharply and closed the identity mismatch problem right at the registration perimeter.
Regulatory Compliance Held
Routing high-value orders into structured retail finance contracts signed through the official e-contract platform holds strict central bank compliance on exactly the transactions that require it.
Marketing Independence
The headless content system means published financing terms change the day the business decides they change, rather than waiting for the next engineering release cycle.
More Portfolios
Azure SaaS Fintech Platform for Loan Management
Discover a SaaS fintech platform on Azure that streamlines loan management, lender integration, and financing workflows, delivering instant approvals and enhanced customer experience.
View Project