Tabby for Finance H1 2026 expands loans amid soft revenue

Tabby for Finance H1 2026 presents a telling divergence, with the company's lending activity expanding even as its revenue softened, and understanding that split reveals a lot about how a fast-growing buy-now-pay-later business actually works. Tabby, the region's leading BNPL fintech, saw its Saudi financing arm continue to grow its financing portfolio strongly through the first half of 2026 despite a decline in revenues over the period. One honest caveat before going further, the precise half-year figures were not fully available in the sources I could verify, so this focuses on the well-documented dynamics behind the trend rather than an exact pair of numbers, which readers should confirm against the company's filing. But the shape of the story, more lending alongside softer revenue, is clear and instructive. The mechanics explain the apparent contradiction. Tabby makes money in two main ways, from merchants who pay a fee when customers use Tabby at checkout, and increasingly from fees charged to customers on financing and usage. Its financing portfolio, meanwhile, is the pool of installment loans it extends to shoppers. Those two things do not always move together. Through late 2025 and into 2026, Tabby's Saudi entity grew its loan book aggressively, with loans receivable jumping to around 3.66 billion riyals by the end of March 2026 from 3.18 billion at the end of 2025, a rise of nearly 478 million riyals in a single quarter. That portfolio growth reflects strong underlying demand, more shoppers making more purchases in instalments. Yet revenue can still soften if the mix of that activity shifts, if promotional or lower-margin lending grows faster than fee-generating transactions, or if timing effects push income recognition around. In other words, Tabby kept lending more even as the revenue it booked from that activity dipped. The more important tension sits beneath both figures, in risk and funding, and it deserves attention. As Tabby's financing portfolio ballooned, so did its exposure to credit risk, with the net expected credit loss charge rising sharply in early 2026, more than 159 percent higher year on year in the first quarter as the loan book expanded. Rapidly growing a lending business almost always means rising provisions for loans that may not be repaid, and that is the natural cost of scale in BNPL. Funding pressure showed too, with financing costs climbing on higher murabaha borrowing and, notably, the entity's net debt exceeding the maximum limit set by the Saudi Central Bank at one point, a reminder that Tabby operates within firm regulatory guardrails as a SAMA-supervised finance company. Growing the portfolio while managing credit losses and staying within regulatory funding limits is the central balancing act of the business. The regional and strategic significance places this within a booming Saudi digital-finance market. Tabby is the clear regional leader in BNPL, riding the rapid growth of e-commerce and digital payments across the Kingdom, and its portfolio expansion tracks that structural demand directly. Its continued lending growth even amid softer revenue signals confidence in the market opportunity, and it operates in a competitive field alongside rivals like Tamara, both racing to capture the fast-expanding instalment-payments space. The honest caveats are real. Financing growth is only valuable if it converts into durable, profitable revenue rather than rising loan losses, and the softer revenue alongside climbing credit costs is a signal worth watching closely. But the underlying read on Tabby for Finance H1 2026 remains fundamentally a growth story, of a market leader continuing to expand its lending in a booming sector, with the usual caveat that scaling a credit business sustainably means keeping risk and funding firmly in check.