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Tabby wants more of your money
As a sucker for a lazy analogy, I instinctively reached for the tortoise and the hare this morning to describe Tabby Cash’s dash past one million accounts. But while the hare rather suits the headline, the years spent steadily building towards owning more of its customers’ financial lives make a pretty good case for the tortoise being more pertinent here.
A million accounts is a big number, yes, but what we don’t yet know at this nascent stage is how many are active, what balances they hold or how much money is moving through them. So, parking the volume for a moment, what stands out most to me is Tabby’s very explicit focus on remittances, both in its announcements and in the outdoor campaigns I’ve seen, which very directly hone in on sending money home.
That messaging makes sense when you look at its existing customer demographics. Indian, Filipino, Egyptian and Pakistani shoppers account for just over half of Tabby’s UAE shopper base. That doesn’t tell us how many remit, obviously, but there’s a substantial overlap, at least at one remove, with communities for whom sending money home is likely to be super relevant.
Under the hood, it’s LuLu Exchange, the same provider Careem Pay uses. It’s an enormous market, with roughly $62 billion in annual outward remittances from the UAE, and an extremely competitive one between exchanges, banks, fintechs and the like. Original disruptor Wise, for example, is also doubling down on the region, having secured licences for its UAE expansion.
On Wise, I actually hosted a fireside chat with its new regional head, Mohamed Mansour, at Money20/20 a few months back, and he was earnest in his admission that they believe we’re heading towards something resembling a zero-transfer-fee future, where the value lies in the customer relationship and cross-selling higher-margin adjacent financial services. For Tabby, I suspect the thinking is similar. It’s a nice, recurring use to get you in the habit of opening the app.
Historically, of course, one of Tabby’s most enviable advantages was how cheaply it could acquire customers through merchants. The brands did much of the legwork on its behalf via advertising and paid acquisition, bringing shoppers to their websites, where Tabby would suavely swoop in and close the deal at checkout.
It’s a strategy I’ve previously written about in a February 2025 case study. Those merchant relationships in turn gave Tabby a very large, cheaply acquired consumer audience to which it could gradually offer more products.
Tabby Card was rolled out in partnership with Visa to extend that relationship into the physical world. Shop and retail media gave it another way to monetise the app already sitting on your phone, including a clever reversal of the original referral arrangement, whereby the merchant brought you to Tabby, and now the merchant can pay Tabby for prominence to bring you back.
More revenue from a customer you’ve already acquired, with the acquisition and servicing costs spread across more things, so you can see the appeal.
If you’re unfamiliar with the Tabby app…
