Technology
May 18, 2025
Technology
March 10, 2026
Hosam Arab: The Merchant Who Learned to Build Fintech
Hosam Arab looked at his own e-commerce business and saw the problem clearly: the Middle East's fastest-growing demographic had zero friction for borrowing but no way to buy across multiple merchants.
Most founders see a market gap. Arab saw a conviction. In 2019, he walked away from Namshi, the fashion retailer he built into the region's largest online store, to tackle something bigger. Not because BNPL was trending. Because he knew the psychology of the Middle Eastern consumer.
Tabby started with a brutal insight: credit card penetration in the Middle East was stuck in the low double digits while e-commerce was booming. Traditional banks had already decided the problem wasn't worth solving. They were wrong.
Arab's first move was deliberate. He pulled Daniil Barkalov from Careem, where Barkalov had learned to scale technology at massive speed. This wasn't a hiring decision. It was a signal about what Tabby would be built on: deep consumer psychology married to ruthless engineering. The co-founder wasn't a fintech expert. He was someone who understood how to move money at scale.
The product reflected this bias toward execution. Tabby didn't invent BNPL. It made it Shariah-compliant, interest-free, and frictionless. A Shia businessman didn't need to choose between faith and convenience anymore. That's not a feature. That's a market unlocking itself.
By 2023, Tabby hit $1.5 billion valuation. By early 2025, it had more than doubled to $3.3 billion. The company processes $10 billion in annual transaction volume across 15 million users and 40,000 merchants. In a market flooded with BNPL copycats, Tabby became the only independent fintech unicorn.
Arab stayed obsessed on one thing: remaining independent while expanding beyond BNPL. That conviction matters. The entire MENA payments ecosystem consolidates while Tabby raises capital at higher valuations. That's not luck. It's what happens when a founder starts with a real insight instead of a playbook.
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