Nomura’s Laser Digital helps launch $100M Saudi SME credit vault on BNB Chain

Nomura’s Laser Digital has partnered to launch the $100 million zEMS Vault on BNB Chain, targeting credit access for Saudi small and medium-sized enterprises. The vault is designed to channel on-chain capital into SME lending in the region, with BNB Chain serving as the underlying settlement network. The initiative matters because it pairs a major Japanese financial institution’s digital-asset arm with tokenized real-world credit, a segment increasingly pitched as a bridge between DeFi liquidity and traditional borrowers. It also adds another institutional-grade use case to BNB Chain’s real-world asset push. What to watch next is whether the vault attracts its full $100 million allocation and how the underlying Saudi SME loans perform.