UAE credit reports to include Tabby and Tamara accounts from July

Al Etihad Credit Bureau is adding buy now, pay later account information from Tabby and Tamara to UAE credit reports from July, giving banks and other authorised entities visibility of consumers' instalment commitments when assessing credit applications.

The change applies to both existing and new customers of the two providers and includes relevant historical transactions. The bureau, the UAE's federal credit information entity, said the move widens the financial information available to lenders and brings new-to-credit customers into the credit ecosystem. The data will appear in credit reports; the bureau has not changed the methodology used to calculate credit scores.

"Responsible lending starts with a clear view of a person's finances, and we have always underwritten in real time to make credit more accessible," said Hosam Arab, co-founder and CEO of Tabby. Sagar Shah, Tamara's UAE general manager, said the initiative supports "greater transparency and creating more opportunities for people to participate in the financial system." Marwan Ahmad Lutfi, the bureau's director general, said credit reports should provide a broad view of financial commitments as new forms of consumer financing gain adoption.

Both companies already report in Saudi Arabia, where they do the majority of their business. Tamara shares active customer information periodically with SIMAH, the Saudi Credit Bureau, under Saudi Central Bank requirements covering banks, finance companies and BNPL providers, with data flowing into Molim, the bureau's credit reporting and scoring system. Coverage there has been described by legal analysts as incomplete, with not all BNPL activity captured, but the principle of BNPL sitting inside the national credit infrastructure is established.

Elsewhere the picture is patchier. In the US, reporting remains voluntary and contested.

Affirm began sending all its pay-over-time products, including short pay-in-four plans, to Experian in April 2025 and TransUnion the following month, making it the outlier. Klarna reports only its longer-term interest-bearing financing and withholds pay-in-four, which accounts for the bulk of its US business, arguing the bureaus lack models to process the data responsibly. Afterpay furnishes almost nothing.

FICO announced two BNPL-specific scoring models in June 2025 that have yet to reach the market, and the data the bureaus do receive is tagged and kept out of the scores lenders actually pull, the same separation between reporting and scoring the UAE bureau has drawn. Klarna does share data with UK credit bureaus, a position it has contrasted with its US stance.

The UAE change therefore brings both of the market's dominant providers into the national credit file simultaneously, something no major Western market has achieved, while stopping short of letting that history move a consumer's score.

Tabby, MENA's most valuable fintech at $4.5 billion, reports more than 25 million registered users and $18 billion in annualised sales volume across Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Kuwait, and has been expanding into regulated financial services on both sides of the Gulf, launching a spending account on its UAE wallet licence this month.

Tamara holds full consumer finance and BNPL licences from SAMA and a restricted finance licence from the UAE central bank, and reported first-quarter revenue up 210% and its first positive retained earnings this year, supported by a Goldman Sachs, Citi and Apollo financing facility upsized to SAR 5.8 billion. It was last valued at $1 billion in its 2023 Series C and has raised more than $550 million in equity to date.