Saudi fintech is moving beyond BNPL

For years, "Saudi fintech" and "buy-now-pay-later" were close enough to synonymous that it was easy to treat the two as the same story. That is no longer an accurate way to describe the market. The clearest evidence sits in Tabby's own recent numbers: a company that built its name on installment checkout financing is now profitable at a $6.5 billion valuation, with $18 billion in annualised transaction volume across 25 million users, according to its own Series F announcement — and, by its own account, actively pushing beyond BNPL into a broader shopping and financial-services footprint. TechScoop's report on that $233 million raise covers the deal itself; this piece is about what the shift underneath it means for the wider market. BNPL was never going to stay BNPL forever Buy-now-pay-later, as a standalone product, has a structural ceiling. It works best as a checkout feature bundled into someone else's purchase decision, which makes it an effective wedge into consumer finance but a comparatively thin business on its own — margins depend heavily on merchant fees, which come under pressure as more providers compete for the same checkout. Companies that built their scale on BNPL alone eventually face a choice: stay a feature that other companies' apps depend on, or become a broader financial platform that owns more of the customer relationship. Tabby's trajectory, becoming a shopping app in its own right rather than solely a checkout button, is a clear example of choosing the second path. Embedded finance is where the next layer of growth is coming from If BNPL was the wedge, embedded finance is what several of the market's most active companies are building on top of it. Tarabut's business is the clearest illustration: rather than lending directly to consumers, it provides the open banking infrastructure that lets banks and other fintechs build lending, account-linking and payment products into their own apps. Tarabut's $50 million financing round , backed by Riyad Bank, GIB Saudi, X-Tech Fund and the Zamil and Kanoo groups, is explicitly earmarked for deepening that embedded finance push, and the more than 5 billion API calls the company says its platform has processed, per its own announcement , is evidence that embedded finance in Saudi Arabia has already moved well past the pilot stage. The distinction between what Tabby and Tarabut are each building is worth making explicit: Tabby is diversifying a consumer-facing brand into more financial products, while Tarabut is building the infrastructure other companies' financial products run on. Both count as "moving beyond BNPL" in a broad sense, but they represent two different bets on where the value in the next phase of Saudi fintech will accrue — owning the customer relationship, or owning the rails underneath it. SME lending is absorbing a growing share of the market's attention The BNPL-era playbook — venture capital funding both product and the capital advanced to consumers — is giving way to a different model in SME lending specifically, where institutional capital is increasingly funding the loan book while a fintech platform handles origination and underwriting. That shift is real enough to merit its own analysis, which TechScoop covers separately in why institutional capital is pouring into Saudi SME lending . The short version: SME credit has become one of the more active fronts in Saudi fintech precisely because BNPL and consumer lending have already been substantially built out, leaving small-business finance as one of the larger remaining underserved segments. Payments infrastructure is the least visible, but arguably most consequential, shift Underneath both of those product-level stories sits a quieter one: Saudi Arabia's payment infrastructure — mada, Apple Pay, and newly arriving rails like Alipay+ and Tap to Pay on iPhone — is becoming steadily more interconnected, a dynamic TechScoop maps out in how Saudi Arabia is quietly building one of the region's most connected payment ecosystems . That infrastructure buildout matters for the BNPL-to-beyond-BNPL story because every one of the products described above — installment checkout, embedded lending, SME credit — depends on the same underlying rails to actually move money. As those rails become more interoperable, the cost of building and launching new financial products on top of them tends to fall, which is likely to accelerate the diversification already under way across the market's biggest platforms. Why competitive and product pressures both point the same direction Two separate forces are pushing BNPL-first companies toward diversification at roughly the same time. On the competitive side, once a market has multiple credible BNPL providers, checkout financing alone stops being a durable differentiator — merchants can, and do, negotiate with several providers, and consumers increasingly expect installment options as a baseline feature rather than a reason to choose one app over another.