Gulf BNPL leaders Tabby and Tamara cross unicorn marks as Indian fintechs eye the GCC

The back-to-back funding rounds that vaulted Tabby and Tamara into unicorn territory in 2024 - with both companies anchored by the Public Investment Fund, Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth vehicle, and supported by regional family office capital - have confirmed that the Gulf Cooperation Council is the world's most attractive near-term opportunity for buy-now-pay-later business models. The region combines high average transaction values, significant affluence-driven appetite for consumer credit, low credit-bureau penetration that creates underwriting differentiation for technology-native lenders, and a population with high smartphone penetration and English-language commerce familiarity that removes many of the distribution barriers that make BNPL expansion hard in South or Southeast Asia. Tabby, the Dubai-based market leader, has expanded from its original buy-now-pay-later product into a broader consumer finance platform that includes longer-tenor instalment plans, a card product and a growing merchant-services business. Its Saudi Arabia and UAE operations are both reportedly profitable at the contribution-margin level, and the company has been using its funding to invest in the technology and risk infrastructure needed to expand into the more complex Gulf markets like Kuwait and Qatar. Tamara, the Saudi-focused competitor, has taken a more concentrated approach, building depth in the Kingdom's market - the largest single consumer market in the GCC - before expanding regionally. For Indian fintechs looking outward, the Gulf is an increasingly discussed expansion opportunity. The GCC's large NRI population - over three million Indians in the UAE, over two million in Saudi Arabia - creates a natural acquisition base for Indian-origin financial products. Razorpay has been expanding its merchant-payments capabilities in the region, and Pine Labs has been processing transactions at Gulf retail locations for several years. The BNPL-specific opportunity for Indian companies is narrower - Tabby and Tamara have established dominant positions that are hard to challenge frontally - but adjacent infrastructure plays in collections, credit scoring and digital identity verification represent potential wedges. The payment-network interoperability between India's UPI and the Gulf payment systems is a medium-term opportunity that both countries' central banks have been discussing. If UPI-to-Gulf payment corridors are established with the same efficiency as the India-Singapore UPI link, the cross-border remittance and commerce flows between India's massive Gulf diaspora and their home-country connections will create infrastructure demand that no single existing player can fully serve. What to watch: whether Tabby or Tamara pursues a regional stock exchange listing - on Tadawul or the NASDAQ Dubai - as the next step in their capital strategy, how India's UPI internationalisation efforts in the Gulf translate into commercial activity for Indian fintech companies, and whether any Indian BNPL operator makes a formal entry into the GCC market through an acquisition or partnership.

Original source: Reuters