From a Buy Now, Pay Later pioneer to a broader consumer-finance platform

‍

ESTIMATED READING TIME: 6 MINUTES

‍

Investment announcements usually explain what was invested in, but rarely the conviction behind the decision. Behind the Investment is our attempt to open that window. In each edition, we will share the market insight, business model, people and milestones that shaped our thinking.

‍

For our first edition, we look at Tamara. In 2024, Anfal made its first equity co-investment in the Saudi fintech platform alongside our partners at Shorooq Partners. In late 2025, following further progress by the company and continued evaluation of the opportunity, we made a follow-on investment.

‍

Our thesis was never simply that Buy Now, Pay Later would grow. We believed Tamara could use BNPL as an entry point into a much larger opportunity: addressing Saudi Arabia's underpenetrated consumer-finance market and building a trusted, technology-led platform through which consumers could increasingly shop, pay and access credit.

‍

1. Addressing an underpenetrated consumer-finance market

‍

Saudi Arabia has a sophisticated banking system, but flexible consumer credit remains relatively underpenetrated. Redseer estimated credit-card penetration at approximately 25% in 2023, while Bank for International Settlements data show household credit at 31.7% of Saudi GDP in Q4 2025, compared with 45.6% across emerging economies. Together with the Kingdom's established credit-information infrastructure, including SAMA-licensed credit bureaus such as SIMAH and Bayan, these conditions gave us conviction that responsible digital consumer-finance models could have greater structural headroom in Saudi Arabia and the wider GCC than in more mature credit markets such as Europe and the United States.

We did not view this simply as an opportunity to encourage more borrowing. We saw room for responsible, transparent and locally relevant financing products that give consumers greater control over when and how they pay.

BNPL was the initial product, but the underlying problem was considerably larger: expanding access to well-designed consumer finance in a market where many customers remained underserved by traditional products.

‍

2. Strong secular tailwinds in digital commerce and payments

‍

Tamara is positioned at the intersection of two powerful structural trends: the digitalisation of payments and the continued growth of e-commerce.

When we underwrote Tamara in 2024, the direction of travel was already clear. Electronic payments had reached 70% of Saudi retail transactions in 2023, up from 62% in 2022, while e-commerce adoption continued to rise from a relatively low base. There was strong momentum, but also meaningful headroom.

The trend has continued. Electronic payments reached 85% of retail transactions in 2025, according to SAMA. We believed Tamara could become an important pillar of the infrastructure supporting this growth.

At the point of purchase, Tamara connects consumers and merchants while bringing together checkout, payment processing, credit assessment, fraud management, servicing, settlement and financing. As commerce becomes increasingly digital, platforms embedded across this infrastructure can grow with the market and capture more of the value created around each transaction.

‍

3. A visionary founder and high-energy leadership team

‍

Growth investments are ultimately bets on people. Throughout our engagement, we were impressed by co-founder Abdulmajeed Alsukhan's vision, charisma and ambition, as well as the energy of the wider leadership team.

The team combines deep local-market knowledge with experience across fintech, payments, engineering, consumer technology and the scaling of high-growth businesses globally. Its ambition extended beyond building a successful BNPL company to creating one of the region's leading consumer-finance platforms.

Executing that vision requires managing rapid growth, credit risk, regulation, institutional funding and new product launches without losing the simplicity of the customer experience. We believed the founders and leadership team had the credibility, energy and capability to pursue that opportunity.

‍

4. A powerful two-sided network

‍

At the time of Tamara's Series C announcement in December 2023, the company reported more than 10 million users and over 30,000 partner merchants. By September 2025, this had grown to more than 20 million customers and over 87,000 merchants.

This creates a reinforcing flywheel and, over time, a defensible moat: more consumers attract more merchants; more merchants strengthen Tamara's ubiquity and attract more consumers.

The value of that network extends beyond BNPL. On the consumer side, it can support shopping discovery, offers, payments and additional financing products. On the merchant side, Tamara is already using the network for promotions and advertising, with longer-term potential across merchant financing, expense management and other commerce tools. The network is therefore not only a distribution advantage, but a platform for future value creation.

‍

5. Trust as financial infrastructure

‍

Tamara describes its platform as being built around three principles: Simplicity, Trust and Ubiquity. Of these, trust is fundamental to the model.

Trusted payment intermediaries helped unlock early e-commerce by reducing the perceived risk of transacting online. Tamara has the potential to play a similar role in the region by giving consumers confidence in the payment experience and giving merchants confidence in reliable processing and settlement.

Trust must also extend to regulators and financing partners. A consumer-finance platform may have strong customer demand, but it cannot scale without stable funding. The confidence of banks and institutional capital providers in Tamara's underwriting, servicing, governance and reporting is therefore a critical part of the infrastructure behind the business.

‍

6. The potential to become a broader digital-finance platform

‍

Our long-term thesis was that Tamara could become significantly more than a BNPL provider.

BNPL gave the company an initial consumer relationship, a large merchant network, transaction data and a position at the point of purchase. Together, these assets created a foundation from which Tamara could introduce longer-duration consumer financing, payment products and other financial services.

Tamara's combination of consumer relationships, merchant distribution, technology, regulatory capabilities and funding infrastructure creates a credible pathway towards becoming a much broader digital-finance platform over time.

‍

From investment thesis to execution

‍

The strength of an investment thesis is ultimately determined by execution. Since our initial investment, Tamara has delivered several public milestones that helped validate our original assessment.

In March 2025, Tamara became the first Saudi fintech startup to receive a fully fledged consumer-finance licence from SAMA, covering both consumer finance and BNPL. This expanded the company's addressable market and enabled it to launch longer-duration, profit-generating financing products.

‍

Q1 2026 PUBLIC RESULTS

‍

• SAR669.5 million total revenue, up approximately 210% from SAR216.0 million in Q1 2025.

• SAR182.1 million profit from Islamic financing, representing approximately 27% of total revenue, from no contribution in the comparable period.

• SAR123.4 million net profit, up approximately 378% from SAR25.8 million in Q1 2025.

‍

Source: Tamara Finance Company, Q1 2026 condensed consolidated interim financial information. Figures relate to the regulated Saudi finance company and its consolidated financing vehicle, rather than necessarily the entire international Tamara group.

Funding execution was equally important. In September 2025, Tamara announced a Sharia-compliant asset-backed facility of up to US$2.4 billion from Goldman Sachs, Citi and funds managed by Apollo. The facility refinanced and expanded an earlier US$500 million arrangement and provided greater capacity to support new credit and payment products.

These milestones supported our decision to follow on in late 2025. Risks remain, including credit performance, funding costs, regulation, competition, market sentiment, and IPO readiness. However, our original thesis has progressively moved from possibility to evidence.

‍

ABOUT BEHIND THE INVESTMENT

‍

Behind the Investment is an Anfal series exploring the thinking behind selected investments across our portfolio. Each article examines the structural opportunity, business model and long-term thesis that informed our investment decision.

Disclaimer: This article is provided for general informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice, an offer or a solicitation to buy or sell any security. Tamara is a privately held company. All company financial and operating figures referenced are drawn exclusively from publicly available sources.

‍