Riyadh's position as Saudi Arabia's financial capital means banking and financial services businesses here deal with a concentrated, sophisticated regulatory environment across SAMA, the Capital Market Authority, and ZATCA, all headquartered in or heavily present within the city.
This concentration means legal work in this sector benefits enormously from attorneys who interact with these regulators regularly, understanding not just the written rules but how they're actually applied in practice.
Banks and licensed finance companies rely on our Banking & Finance Law practice for facility documentation, security registration, and regulatory compliance with SAMA's specific rules governing lending institutions, work that requires precision given the scale and regulatory scrutiny involved.
We draft and review facility agreements from the lender's perspective while also understanding the borrower's side of these same relationships, giving us a genuinely complete picture of how these agreements actually function in practice.
Islamic finance and takaful structuring is a core part of this practice, and for institutional clients this means structuring genuinely complex Sharia-compliant products — not just adapting a conventional facility with different terminology, but building instruments that satisfy both Sharia board requirements and SAMA's regulatory framework simultaneously.
This dual compliance requirement is where institutional Islamic finance work becomes genuinely technical, and we coordinate closely with Sharia scholars and compliance teams to ensure a structure holds up under both forms of scrutiny.
Financial institutions raising capital through the Saudi Exchange or structuring securities offerings rely on our Capital Markets & Securities practice, coordinated closely with our finance team given how these transactions typically involve both securities regulation and banking law considerations at once.
This work spans everything from initial listing preparation to ongoing disclosure compliance for institutions already operating in the public markets.
Finance, Banking & Tax is one of the firm's two flagship practices, alongside Corporate & Commercial, reflecting Riyadh's dual identity as both the corporate and financial center of the Kingdom, and the attorneys in this practice work these specific files daily rather than occasionally.
This depth of specific experience matters when a genuinely novel structuring question arises, since precedent and pattern recognition from handling similar matters repeatedly often produces a better answer than reasoning from first principles alone.
Banking and financial services work rarely exists in isolation from a client's broader corporate structure and tax position, and we coordinate across these dimensions as one engagement, since a financing decision often has real corporate governance and zakat or tax implications worth considering together.
This integrated approach avoids the situation where a financing structure gets approved in isolation only to create complications elsewhere in the client's broader legal and tax position.
Message the firm on WhatsApp to discuss your specific situation, whether that's structuring a new facility, navigating SAMA compliance, or a capital markets transaction.
Given this is a flagship practice, you can expect a genuinely knowledgeable response, typically within the same day.
Yes — Finance, Banking & Tax is one of the firm's two flagship practices, alongside Corporate & Commercial.
Yes — Islamic finance and takaful structuring is a core part of this practice.
Yes — our Capital Markets & Securities practice handles this, coordinated closely with our finance team.
Yes, though never in the same specific transaction — this dual perspective gives us a genuinely complete picture of how these agreements function in practice.
An Islamic finance structure needs to satisfy both a Sharia board's requirements and SAMA's regulatory framework simultaneously, and we coordinate with Sharia scholars and compliance teams to ensure this holds up under both forms of scrutiny.
Expert Riyadh