Banks, insurers, asset managers, VCs, and family offices in the Kingdom share one regulator and one rule: customer communications cannot live on a foreign cloud. SCOVR is the platform built to that standard, on day one.
In October 2024, the Saudi Central Bank issued a binding directive to every financial institution under its supervision: instant chat applications such as WhatsApp must not be used to communicate with customers, and must be treated as unreliable channels.
The directive was issued amid a sharp rise in scams routed through consumer messengers. The rule applies to retail banking, commercial banking, investment banking, insurers, finance companies, and every regulated financial entity operating in the Kingdom. SCOVR is the sovereign communications stack built to that standard — encrypted by default, hosted in-Kingdom, auditable end to end, and free of every channel SAMA has classified as unreliable.
SAMA Rulebook reference 000046025849 · in force"Not to use instant chat applications such as WhatsApp and similar applications in communicating with customers, and to consider them unreliable channels."
Business angels, venture funds, and family offices handle deal flow, term sheets, board minutes, LP communications, and signed instruments — all of which are exactly the content adversaries and scammers target on consumer messengers.
Cap-table updates, founder check-ins, syndicate coordination, and signed convertible notes — moving over channels regulators have already classified as unreliable.
Deal flow, IC papers, LP reporting, portfolio governance, and live diligence rooms. Foreign-cloud messengers leak the social graph that defines a fund's edge.
Multi-generational wealth, real-estate transactions, philanthropic flows, and principals' personal communications — the highest-value targets in the entire region.
The directive doesn't draw lines between front-, middle-, or back-office. If a regulated institution is communicating about a customer, the channel matters.
Deposits, lending, payments — the regulated core.
Capital deployed into public and private markets.
Pooling and transferring loss exposure.
Digital infrastructure under the same SAMA umbrella.
The compliance scaffolding around every regulated entity. Audit firms, exchanges, rating agencies, and the regulators themselves communicate on the same channels — and inherit the same prohibition.
Built on the Matrix protocol — federated, end-to-end encrypted, decentralised — and deployed inside the Kingdom on infrastructure your compliance team controls.
Every chat, voice call, video meeting, and file transfer encrypted at the device. No vendor-side decrypt path. No master-key escrow. The cryptography is not optional — it is the default channel.
Self-hosted, dedicated tenant, or AMVLET-managed sovereign cloud — all in Saudi Arabia. PDPL-aligned residency by default. No cross-border transfers without explicit, logged authorisation.
Verified-identity customer rooms, branded chat for retail banking, advisor-client channels for wealth managers, and document-signing flows — all on SCOVR, all auditable, all without ever touching a consumer messenger.
Selectively federate with SAMA, CMA, exchange operators, audit firms, and counterparties. Each side keeps its own keys, servers, and audit log. No shared cloud middleman in another jurisdiction.
Saudi Arabia led MENA venture capital for the third consecutive year in 2025 — and every dollar of that activity passes through institutions SAMA regulates.
The directive was issued amid a measurable rise in consumer-messenger fraud targeting bank customers — impersonation of bank staff, fake transfer instructions, and credential phishing — at a scale that made informal channels structurally incompatible with regulated finance. The risk is not theoretical, and it is not historical. It is current.
For institutions, the question is no longer whether to migrate customer comms off consumer messengers. The question is which sovereign stack to migrate them onto — and whether that stack will pass an audit on the day SAMA asks. SCOVR is built to that day.
Twenty minutes with our finance-sector team. Reference architectures for retail banking, asset management, and capital allocators. Live SCOVR deployments in the Kingdom.