Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Industry and Mineral Resources has signed an MoU with Standard Chartered Bank in order to improve investments in mining. The memorandum of understanding aims to promote knowledge transfer, job creation, and technology enablement, as well as the implementation of the Future Minerals Forum outcomes.

It will also encourage local as well as international investors to explore more opportunities in the mining and mineral sectors in Saudi Arabia. MoU will also focus on the cooperation between Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Industry and Mineral Resources and the Standard Chartered Bank, while concentrating on accelerating the process of their projects and investments in the mineral and mining value chains, such as the green metals or the batter components. Saudi Arabia’s mining industry The government of Saudi Arabia is investing in the development of the mining industry, as it also aims to upgrade laws in order to attract more private players in the area.

Saudi Arabia possesses more than 20 different kinds of minerals, such as gold, copper, iron, gravel, granite, as well as marble. It also has 35 locations and areas with specific geological designed formations. These are called mineral belts and need special rules of functionating since they contain an abundant number of mineral deposits.

The government expects improvements from the investments as soon as possible since the development of the mineral industry will also provide multiple job opportunities and will boost local spending in Saudi Arabia. Standard Chartered Bank’s development strategy The UK-based financial institution Standard Chartered Bank had multiple partnerships and product launches in the past few months, covering multiple geographies. At the beginning of February of 2023, the bank announced that it enabled Allinpay’s merchants in Hong Kong to accept PayNow instant payment services in Singapore dollars.

The new process takes place only while using a QR code. The Singapore PayNow solution was designed to make Singapore dollar instant payments at Allinpay’s participating merchants and traders in Hong Kong. The feature was also made possible with Standard Chartered’s proprietary solutions, such as its omnichannel gateway ‘Straight2Bank Pay’ and API-based FX pricing engine named ‘SCALE’.

Allinpay served a merchant network of more than 30,000 acceptance points across Hong Kong. This allows the product to provide customers with comprehensive integrated payment services, including international credit and payment cards, as well as e-wallets including Alipay and WeChat Pay. Before the collaboration with Allinpay, in November of 2022, Standard Chartered announced the launch of Payouts-as-a-Service (PaaS), a bank-grade fintech solution designed to allow digital businesses to manage one-to-many payments to merchants and and other parties in their ecosystem.

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