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Speaking on Thmanyah's BusinessTalks podcast late last year, Abdulmajeed Alsukhan described the process of getting Tamara's consumer financing licence from SAMA. They submitted, got sent back with gaps, fixed them, got sent back again. 'They were patient with us,' he said, crediting the regulator's willingness to work with them rather than dwelling on the years it took to get there.
When the licence finally came through in February 2025, it was the first full consumer financing permit ever granted to a fintech startup in the Kingdom, and it landed in the hands of a company that had entered SAMA's sandbox five years earlier with, as Alsukhan put it, very simple capital and a very simple idea.
The idea (let shoppers split small purchases into interest-free instalments and charge the merchant for the privilege) hadn't changed, but what SAMA was now giving Alsukhan and co permission to do with it had changed completely.
They could now lend real money, for real durations, at real rates, to millions of Saudi consumers who'd never had a serious alternative to the banks.
The company moved fast. Within months, Tamara launched a long-term consumer financing product structured under Islamic principles, a category of lending it had never offered before and that its principal rival Tabby, as of its most recent accounts, still doesn't.
By the end of the year, the new product had grown from nothing into a meaningful share of the total loan book, generating an entirely new revenue stream alongside the original BNPL model, because for the first time Tamara isn't just facilitating payments on behalf of merchants, it's charging borrowers a profit margin on credit extended.
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The audited accounts, signed off by PwC on April 1, 2026, tell the story of what that transformation looks like at scale.
Revenue of SAR 1.35 billion, up 90% on the prior year. A net profit of SAR 193 million, reversing a loss of similar magnitude twelve months earlier. And a funding facility, announced at Money 20/20 Middle East in September 2025 backed by Goldman Sachs, Citi, and Apollo, that replaced the company's existing debt structure with something several times larger and meaningfully cheaper.
As with the Tabby analysis, we're looking exclusively at Saudi entities here, not the wider Tamara group, which operates in the UAE and Kuwait and encompasses the company's Dubai, Egypt, and technology affiliates under a Cayman Islands holding company. Even so, the Saudi subsidiary is where the lending happens, where the regulatory permissions sit, and where the overwhelming majority of the revenue is generated.
Two weeks ago, we published a companion analysis of Tabby's first audited annual accounts, asking what they reveal about how MENA's most valuable fintech actually makes money, funds its lending, manages its risk, and plans to outmanoeuvre the regulatory constraints boxing it in.
This piece asks the opposite question: what happens when the regulatory constraints are lifted, and the company that the Harvard Business School case study described as the competitor charging consumers 5% at checkout (disguised, quite funnily, as "IncogKSA") is suddenly free to reinvent itself as a licensed Islamic lender with a multi-billion dollar war chest?
So, having combed through forty pages of audited financial statements and notes, we've distilled our findings into four insights.
Where the revenue actually comes from, and what an explosion in consumer processing fees tells you about the convergence between Saudi Arabia's two largest BNPL players
How Tamara's credit metrics compare to Tabby's now that both sets of full-year audited accounts are on the table, and what a partnership with open banking infrastructure provider Lean reveals about how the company underwrites its new book
How the largest fintech funding facility in the region actually works, and why the pricing it secured changes the competitive arithmetic
What the balance sheet cleanup tells you about the race to ring the Tadawul bell first
What follows is the product of reading every page, so you don't have to.
1. How Tamara actually makes money
Brad Stone's biography of Jeff Bezos famously describes a founder who started by selling books through the mail but who was never content with being a bookseller, whose ambition from the start was to build what Stone called "the everything store."
Everything you need to know about how Saudi's two largest BNPL players actually work, from the inside out.
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