From Oil Fields to Fintech: The Majid Al Amri Story

In March 2016, a computer engineering graduate who had spent over a decade working in Oman's oil sector registered a company called Thawani Technologies. There were no headline funding rounds, no Silicon Valley backers, and no glossy press release. A decade later, Thawani Pay sits on the Forbes Middle East Fintech 50 list, holds a Visa credit card license, and stands as the only Omani company to have done both. Behind it all is Majid Al Amri: engineer, oil-industry veteran, and the quiet architect of Oman's most consequential fintech story.

🎓 From SQU Campus to the Oilfields

Al Amri graduated from Sultan Qaboos University in 2003 with a degree in Computer Engineering. He then took a path that might seem counterintuitive for a tech graduate: a long stint in Oman's energy sector, working with both PDO (Petroleum Development Oman) and Schlumberger across roles in sales, business development, finance, and accounts management.

Those years were formative in ways that a startup accelerator cannot replicate. Working inside Oman's largest industrial institutions gave Al Amri a ground-level understanding of how money moves in the Omani economy: how large enterprises manage vendor payments, how procurement decisions get made, and, critically, where the friction is. He also volunteered as an SME adviser at Al Zubair SEC, which brought him into direct contact with the smaller end of the market and the structural gaps that small Omani businesses face every day.

💡 The Fintech Pivot

By 2016, Al Amri had seen enough to know that Oman's payment infrastructure was leaving both consumers and businesses behind. The kingdom lacked a homegrown digital payments platform built for local needs: Arabic-language UX, Omani banking partnerships, and compliance designed around Central Bank of Oman rules from the ground up rather than grafted on afterward.

He founded Thawani Technologies LLC in March 2016 and launched the payment platform publicly in 2017. The company did not announce a venture round or enter a high-profile accelerator. It built quietly and applied for the licenses that mattered.

One of those milestones set the stage for everything that followed: Thawani became the first financial technology firm in Oman to receive a payment services license from the Central Bank of Oman, according to the company's own disclosures. This was not just a legal formality. It gave Thawani a regulatory head start over any international fintech looking to enter the Omani market.

💳 What Thawani Does

Thawani Pay is an e-payment platform that connects consumers, merchants, banks, and institutions under a single infrastructure. The product enables digital transactions across retail, e-commerce, and institutional payments. Unlike global fintech platforms that treat Oman as a secondary market, Thawani was designed for it from day one.

Sultan Qaboos University formalized this local trust by signing a campus payment cooperation agreement with Thawani, making the platform part of everyday university life for SQU students and staff.

📊 Forbes Fintech 50: Two Consecutive Rankings

In 2024, Thawani ranked 40th on the Forbes Middle East Fintech 50, making it the only Omani company on the list. The following year, as Muscat Daily reported, Thawani climbed to 36th, a four-place improvement that signaled momentum rather than a one-off inclusion.

For context, the Forbes Fintech 50 in the Middle East is dominated by UAE and Saudi companies. An Oman-based fintech appearing twice in a row, and climbing the rankings each time, is a notable achievement in a competitive field.

🏆 Oman's First Visa-Licensed Fintech

The milestone that marks Thawani's clearest leap came in 2025. The company secured a Visa license to issue credit cards, as Times of Oman covered at the time, making it the first Omani fintech to hold this license.

Securing a Visa issuing license requires meeting Visa's global compliance standards, demonstrating capital adequacy, and obtaining regulatory approval from the Central Bank of Oman. For a company built organically from Muscat over nine years, without the typical venture capital runway of its regional peers, this is a hard-won milestone that opens the door to a full consumer credit product.

⚖️ Shaping the Rules, Not Just Following Them

What distinguishes Al Amri's journey is not just that Thawani complied with Oman's fintech regulations. The company helped write them. Thawani was involved in shaping the regulatory legislation that now governs fintech in the Sultanate, positioning it not as a rule-follower but as a participant in building the framework that others now operate under.

This kind of regulatory influence is rare for a founder-led company in any market. In Oman, where the government plays an active role in shaping the digital economy under Vision 2040, it gives Thawani a structural relationship with policy that most startups never develop.

🌱 Part of a Broader Oman Founder Story

Al Amri's trajectory sits alongside a growing cohort of Omani founders who built products for local markets and earned regional recognition by doing so. Thawani's fintech story echoes in different sectors: in F&B, Fascano recently raised $10M for its restaurant SaaS, built on the same premise that local market knowledge beats imported platforms. What unites these stories is patient, market-grounded building rather than growth-at-all-costs playbooks.

🇴🇲 Why This Matters for Oman

Oman Vision 2040 places financial technology among the priority sectors for economic diversification. A homegrown fintech that holds a Forbes Fintech 50 ranking and a Visa credit card license is exactly the proof point the Vision needs: that Omani founders, working from Muscat, can build products that earn international recognition without replicating foreign startup blueprints.

As Oman's AI Special Zone takes shape and the startup funding environment matures, Al Amri's decade-long journey from SQU engineering graduate to fintech pioneer offers a clear template for what patient, compliance-first, market-focused building looks like in the Sultanate. The Thawani story is still being written. But the foundation is solid.