Unstoppable Starts Here: How Tabby Grew Beyond BNPL, with Zarik Nabi and Paymentology's Jeff Parker

Quick Summary

In the first of three clips from Unstoppable Starts Here, filmed at Money20/20 Middle East 2026, Zarik Nabi of Tabby sits down with Jeff Parker, CEO of Paymentology, to trace Tabby's journey: from a free split-in-four BNPL product in the UAE and Saudi Arabia, to a card for everyday spending, longer-term instalment plans and now Tabby Cash, which lets customers spend their own money.

How did Tabby start?

"The journey has been pretty phenomenal," says Zarik. Tabby launched as a BNPL company in two markets, first the UAE and then Saudi Arabia, which has since become its dominant market. The proposition was deliberately simple: split a purchase in four, for free, with merchants and partners paying for it through a subvention-style deal. That was Tabby's model for roughly its first three and a half years.

What came after split-in-four?

• A card product, which did well in the UAE and turned Tabby into a daily spending product using credit, beyond online shopping
• Longer-term plans, spreading payments over 6, 8, 12 months and more, to keep customers with Tabby for longer
• Tabby Cash, live in the UAE and soon launching in Saudi Arabia, so customers can put their own money into Tabby and spend locally and abroad

The last step widens Tabby's reach: "It's not always just credit, because a large part of the customers we cannot give credit to," Zarik says. Jeff picks up on the discipline of starting with one product: "So many companies fail, I think, trying to do too much too soon."

How have customer expectations changed in the region?

When Tabby started, the region was coming out of COVID and a large share of online shopping ran on cash on delivery. Tabby's original premise was to replace that, settle with the retailer and let customers pay Tabby back, a little more affordably. As more people moved to paying online, demand grew for sending money abroad and opening accounts. Zarik credits fintechs with showing customers what is possible, from onboarding and KYC onwards, so that speed, transparency and efficiency, which Tabby treats as North Star metrics, are now expected as the norm rather than something special.

Does technology drive customer demand, or the other way round?

Asked what Jeff calls a "trick question", Zarik says it is a little of both, but he leans towards the customer: "You can change a lot of stuff under the hood, but if nobody's there to adopt it, then it doesn't matter."

FF NEWS TAKE:

Tabby's product sequence is a neat case study in earning the right to expand: one free, simple product first, then credit for everyday spending, then longer plans, then a home for customers' own money. That final step, a debit-style proposition aimed at customers who can't be offered credit, is a very different processing job from BNPL, and it is where an issuer processing partner such as Paymentology comes into the story.