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Sitting between the commercial registration number and the SAMA licence details in Tabby's first publicly published audited annual financial report for its Saudi subsidiary is the kind of line that an analyst's eye hurriedly skips over on the way to the revenue figures. The line reads:
"Effective 12 March 2025, the Company changed its name from Tabby Saudi for Communication and Information Technology to Tabby Financing Company CJSC."
Source: Tabby Financing Company CJSC's audited FY2025 financial statements, page 10
Not long thereafter, in October 2025, Saudi's Central Bank, at last issued the company a formal financing licence for its deferred-payment activities.
MENA's most valuable fintech is no longer, in any sense, a tech startup offering a payments novelty in the Kingdom. It's now a regulated financial institution, and these are its first annual accounts in that capacity.
They arrive at an interesting moment.
In February 2024, Harvard Business School published a case study on Tabby that tackled a question that every two-sided payments platform must eventually grapple with – who's going to foot the bill?
Tabby's model charged merchants a commission for offering split payments at checkout, keeping the service free for consumers. Its principal Saudi competitor (disguised in the case as "IncogKSA," though the identity doesn't require help from 221B Baker Street) had taken the opposite approach, charging consumers roughly 5% for the option to split their payments, which allowed it to offer the service to merchants at zero cost.
Eighteen months later, we have an idea of what side of the equation both have landed, and quel surprise, it's more nuanced than either side of the original question anticipated.
The accounts, signed off by EY, reveal a company generating SAR 1.4 billion (roughly $373 million) in revenue and SAR 206 million in net profit in only its second consecutive year of profitability.
They also contain an Emphasis of Matter paragraph from the auditors (the profession's equivalent of a politely raised eyebrow) noting that Tabby's debt has breached the ceiling prescribed by SAMA by more than half a billion riyals.
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It's a regulatory constraint that takes on particular weight when your principal competitor, Tamara, has just secured $2.4 billion in fresh funding from an imposing triumvirate of Goldman Sachs, Citi, and Apollo, and when the state-backed digital banks such as D360 can launch entire product suites under a single banking licence while Hosam Arab and Co still find themselves waiting years for approval on a single prepaid card.
So, having combed through thirty-five pages of audited financial statements and notes, read carefully (as carefully as we can at least), we've distilled our findings into four insights.
Where the revenue actually comes from and why its composition changed so dramatically in the space of a single year
What happens when borrowers stop paying and how the two largest BNPL players in the region take fundamentally different approaches to dealing with it
How nearly a billion dollars in consumer loans are funded by an obscure Irish entity that most Tabby users will never have heard of
What an acquired digital wallet company whose services were suspended in December 2025 tells you about how Tabby plans to outmanoeuvre the regulatory constraints that are currently boxing it in
What follows is the product of reading every page, so you don't have to.
1. How Tabby actually makes money
The HBS case study included a simplified breakdown of Tabby's unit economics, expressed as a percentage of each transaction's value…
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