Home/About Yusr
About us
We built the bank we kept wishing existed.
Yusr is a Saudi digital bank, licensed by the Saudi Central Bank in 2024 and live on phones across the Kingdom since the first quarter of 2025. No branches, no appointment, no forms in triplicate — just an account that behaves the way the rest of your phone does.
500,000+
Customers across the Kingdom
380+
People working at Yusr
Q1 2025
App launched
2024
Licensed by SAMA
How it started
A licence, a small team, and one very specific complaint
Yusr began with a conversation that most people in the Kingdom have had at some point: you need something simple from your bank, and it takes a morning. A form to collect, a queue to stand in, a call centre that asks for the same number three times, and a statement that arrives too late to tell you anything useful.
The founding team spent 2023 writing that complaint down properly — every step of opening an account, every fee that surprised somebody, every notification that arrived two days after the money left. What came out of it was not a long list of features. It was a short list of things a bank should never make you do.
Yusr Bank was incorporated as a Saudi Joint Stock Company and received its digital banking licence from the Saudi Central Bank in 2024. The first year went almost entirely into the parts customers never see: the core ledger, the payments connections, the controls a regulator expects a bank to be able to evidence on demand. The app came after that, in the first quarter of 2025, with one account and one card and nothing else.
It has grown since — Goals, the mada card, instant transfers, Yusr Later — but the rule has held. We would rather do a short list properly than a long list badly, and we would rather say no to a product than ship one we could not explain in a sentence.
Yusr at a glance
a Saudi Joint Stock Company
Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
plus web servicing
Deposits are protected under the Saudi deposit protection framework. Yusr is supervised by the Saudi Central Bank.
What we believe
Four things we argue about internally so you don't have to
These are not values on a wall. They settle real arguments in real meetings, usually about whether something ships.
Say it plainly or don't say it
Every message we send is written to be understood the first time. If a sentence needs a footnote to be honest, we rewrite the sentence. Fees, limits and declines are stated in the app before they happen, not explained afterwards.
Boring where it counts
A bank is allowed to be exciting about design and dull about risk. Controls, monitoring and reconciliation are not where we experiment, and we would rather delay a feature than launch one our risk team cannot sign off.
A person, not a ticket
Support runs around the clock and answers in the language you wrote in. Nobody at Yusr is measured on how quickly a conversation ends, and every complaint has a named owner until it is closed.
Money you can actually see
Balance in the notification. Category on the transaction. Every Yusr Later instalment visible next to the purchase that created it. If you have to open a spreadsheet to understand your own month, we have failed.
From the CEO
“We are not trying to be the biggest bank in the Kingdom. We are trying to be the one people are relieved to deal with.”
Faisal Al-Qahtani opened Yusr's first customer account on launch day in 2025 and read every review the app received in its first month. Half a million accounts later, the Monday complaints summary still lands in the executive inbox before anything else.
Faisal Al-Qahtani · Chief Executive Officer
Milestones
A short history, so far
Two years old, and most of it spent building the unglamorous half.
Read the announcements-
2024
Licensed as a digital bank
The Saudi Central Bank grants Yusr Bank its licence. The year goes into the ledger, the payments connections and the control framework — everything that has to exist before a single customer can be onboarded.
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Q1 2025
The app goes live
Yusr Current launches on iOS and Android with one account, one card and a median opening time of around eight minutes. Yusr Goals follows within the first months.
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2025
Yusr Card arrives on mada
The debit card rolls out across the customer base on the mada national network, with international scheme rails for online and overseas spending, and one-tap freeze built into the app from day one.
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Late 2025
Yusr Later launches with Taysir
Purchases split into four payments with no interest, provided in partnership with Taysir Finance Company, a separate finance company licensed by the Saudi Central Bank.
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2026
Half a million customers
Yusr passes 500,000 retail customers across the Kingdom, with round-the-clock service and the same five products it started the year with.
Leadership
The people accountable for it
Five executives, one executive committee, and a board that meets quarterly. Names, not job titles behind a general enquiries address.
Faisal Al-Qahtani
Chief Executive Officer
Fifteen years in retail and corporate banking in Riyadh and Manama, then left to build the account that nobody was offering. Chairs the executive committee and owns the bank's relationship with its board.
Reem Al-Dossari
Chief Operating Officer
Runs the working day of the bank: onboarding, payment operations, service delivery and the vendor relationships that sit underneath. Joined from a regional payments processor after scaling its operations team from forty people to four hundred.
Omar Al-Zahrani
Chief Technology Officer
Owns the platform, the app and the engineering organisation. Arrived from large-scale cloud infrastructure rather than from banking, which is why the Yusr core was designed for continuous release and regional resilience from the first commit.
Noura Al-Shammari
Chief Risk Officer
Accountable for credit, financial crime and operational risk, and for how Yusr reports to its regulators. Spent more than a decade in anti-money laundering and sanctions compliance at two Saudi banks before joining as employee number nine.
Bandar Al-Mutairi
Head of Customer Experience
Responsible for everything a customer hears from Yusr, from the first reply in chat to the wording of a declined payment. Built service teams for a Gulf airline before moving into banking, and still takes a shift on the support floor most months.
Want to work here?
We hire across engineering, risk, operations and service. Most roles are open to people who have never worked in a bank before — several of ours had not.
See open rolesOur people
Small enough to know each other, big enough to run a bank
Yusr is more than 380 people across our Riyadh headquarters and our regional operations centre.
Headquarters sits on King Fahd Road in Al Olaya, where the engineering, product, risk and finance teams work. The operations centre carries the round-the-clock side of the business — service, onboarding checks and the shifts that keep the app answered at three in the morning.
Everyone joins with the same first week: a day on the support floor, a day with the risk team, and a session where somebody senior explains exactly how the bank makes money. Nobody should be able to build a product here without knowing who pays for it and what happens when it goes wrong.
Around the clock
In-app chat and phone support run 24 hours a day, every day of the year, in Arabic and English.
Built in the Kingdom
Yusr's primary systems run in Saudi Arabia, and our card transactions are authorised over the mada national network.
Regulated, and glad of it
Licensed and supervised by the Saudi Central Bank. If we cannot evidence it, we do not claim it.
Careers
Come and build the next two years
Open roles across engineering, risk, operations and customer service, in Riyadh and at our operations centre.
Browse open rolesNewsroom
What we've announced lately
Launches, partnerships and milestones, with the press releases behind them. Media enquiries are answered the same day.
Read the newsroom