PayTabs agrees $100M-plus deal for Amazon Payment Services’ MENA operations

Saudi payments infrastructure company PayTabs has agreed to acquire Amazon Payment Services’ operations across the Middle East and North Africa in a transaction valued at more than $100 million.

The deal has been approved by both companies and will bring Amazon’s regional payment processing operations onto PayTabs’ infrastructure, spanning payment processing, transaction switching, foreign exchange and payouts. The combined business is expected to process more than SAR 150 billion ($40 billion) in transactions annually.

Amazon Payment Services currently works with more than 3,500 businesses across nine MENA markets, providing online payment processing through global card networks alongside local rails including mada in Saudi Arabia, KNET in Kuwait and Meeza in Egypt.

The business predates Amazon’s own arrival in the region. It launched in Dubai as PayFort in 2013 and later became part of Souq Group, which Amazon acquired for approximately $583 million net of cash in 2017. PayFort was subsequently rebranded as Amazon Payment Services in December 2020.

For PayTabs, the acquisition marks a considerably larger step in a payments business that began at almost the same time.

Saudi entrepreneur Abdulaziz Al Jouf founded PayTabs in 2014 after struggling to find a suitable online payment gateway for one of his own businesses. The original product was aimed at giving SMEs in Saudi Arabia and the wider region a simpler way to accept payments online.

The company was backed early by Saudi Aramco’s entrepreneurship programme Wa’ed, now Wa’ed Ventures, and later announced a $20 million funding round in 2017 to support its expansion across MENA and Asia. Public databases put PayTabs’ total disclosed external funding at around $20 million, with no subsequent institutional funding round publicly announced.

The companies have not disclosed how the $100 million-plus acquisition is being financed.

PayTabs has instead expanded in recent years partly through acquisitions. It bought Indian payments technology company OGS PayLab in 2022, followed by Saudi payment company Digital Pay and Turkish social commerce platform Paymes later that year. It took full control of PayTabs Egypt in 2025 and acquired UAE contactless payments technology company TAPn’GO in April this year.

The group has also shifted from its original payment gateway product towards infrastructure sold to banks, fintechs, enterprises and governments, including payment orchestration, merchant acquiring technology, transaction switching and payouts. PayTabs is headquartered in Riyadh and now operates across markets including the UAE, Egypt, Jordan, Turkey, India and the GCC.

The Amazon transaction would bring considerably more regional scale to that strategy while consolidating two companies that have competed in MENA online payments for much of the past decade.

For Amazon, it also unwinds part of the financial infrastructure it acquired alongside Souq nine years ago. PayFort was folded into Amazon rather than acquired separately, meaning no standalone value was disclosed for the payments business when the wider Souq transaction completed in 2017.

PayTabs and Amazon said continuity for existing merchants would be prioritised during the integration, with the combined operation expected to offer faster onboarding and more localised regulatory coverage. An exact purchase price, transaction structure and timetable for completion have not been disclosed.