Al Etihad Credit Bureau (AECB), the UAE’s federal credit bureau, will start adding buy now, pay later account data from Tabby and Tamara to UAE credit reports from July 2026. The change covers both new and existing customers of the two providers and includes relevant historical transactions rather than only activity going forward.
Until now, a bank checking a UAE resident’s credit report had no visibility into that person’s active BNPL commitments. A missed instalment with Tabby or Tamara carried no formal consequence beyond the provider’s own systems. From July, that repayment history becomes part of the same file a lender reviews before approving a mortgage, a car loan or a credit card.
“As financial services evolve and new forms of consumer financing gain wider adoption, it is important that credit reports provide a comprehensive view of an individual’s financial commitments,” said Marwan Ahmad Lutfi, director general of Al Etihad Credit Bureau, in comments carried by the .
Hosam Arab, chief executive and co-founder of Tabby, said the change rewards customers who repay on time: “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.” Sagar Shah, general manager UAE at Tamara, said the move supports “greater transparency and creating more opportunities for people to participate in the financial system.”
A 2023 rule made this possible
BNPL operated with little formal oversight in the UAE until the central bank amended its Finance Companies Regulation through Circular No. 3/2023, effective 27 December 2023. The circular classified BNPL as a form of short-term credit and required providers to hold a Restricted Licence, per legal analyses from and .
The rule caps total fees, including late charges, at 30% of the original credit amount. It also limits short-term credit to a single borrower to whichever is lower: AED 20,000 (about $5,446) or three months of that borrower’s verified net income. Restricted Licence Finance Companies must carry out due diligence on a borrower’s creditworthiness before extending credit, though the regulation does not specify a credit-report threshold that triggers that check.
Without that 2023 framework, BNPL had no defined regulatory category and no clean mechanism for treating it as reportable consumer credit. The bureau’s move follows directly from it, more than two and a half years later.
Bureau has expanded scoring before
AECB has broadened what counts towards a credit score once already. In May 2022, it said it had lifted its Credit Score’s coverage to more than 90% of the roughly 13 million individuals and companies in its registry, up from about 70%, in a .
It reached that figure by pulling in monthly salary history, cheque clearance history, and telecom and utility bill payment records, alternative data that made roughly 3 million previously unscoreable people and companies scoreable for the first time. The BNPL addition follows a similar pattern: take financial behaviour that already exists at scale outside the formal credit system and bring it inside.
AECB is separately preparing a scoring overhaul called Credit Score 3.0, expected in the first half of 2026, intended to allow quarterly score updates and shorten how long a delinquency stays flagged, from 24 months to under a year, according to . AECB has not said whether the BNPL data will feed into Credit Score 3.0 specifically or run on the existing scoring model in the meantime.
Market has grown quickly
The UAE’s BNPL market was worth an estimated $4.25 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $5.02 billion in 2026, rising to $11.49 billion by 2031 at a compound annual growth rate of 18%, has estimated. Consumer electronics accounts for the largest share of transaction value, at just over 32%, and fintech providers, rather than banks, handle roughly two-thirds of transaction volume.
Tabby, founded in Dubai in 2019, raised $160 million in a Series E round in February 2025 led by Blue Pool Capital and Hassana Investment Company at a $3.3 billion valuation. Early investors then sold shares in a secondary transaction that valued the company at $4.5 billion by October 2025, and reported.
Tamara, founded in Saudi Arabia, became the kingdom’s first fintech unicorn after a $340 million Series C round in December 2023 valued it at $1 billion, at the time. The company operates across Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Kuwait and has not disclosed a UAE-specific user count; its more than 10 million users and 30,000 partner merchants are reported across all three markets combined.
The broader consumer lending backdrop is also expanding. UAE consumer credit reached AED 598.5 billion in the first quarter of 2026, up from AED 583.9 billion in the fourth quarter of 2025, central bank figures show.
What is not yet clear is whether AECB intends to bring other UAE BNPL providers into its credit reports on a similar timeline, or whether Tabby and Tamara will remain the only two names inside the file while the rest of the market continues to grow around them.
