Tabby has launched Tabby Cash, a fee-free cash account and its first move into everyday banking since the Dubai buy now, pay later provider was founded in 2019. Tabby said more than 150,000 customers have signed up ahead of a full rollout across the UAE in the coming weeks.
The account carries no setup, monthly or card fees and comes with a linked Tabby Cash Card for local and international spending. Standard users earn 1% cashback on selected categories and international purchases; subscribers to Tabby Plus, the company’s paid membership tier, earn 3%.
Tabby is offering a flat 3% cashback rate to all cardholders as a launch promotion running until 1 November 2026. Local transfers are free and unlimited at launch, with international transfers planned for a later release.
Hosam Arab, chief executive and co-founder of Tabby, said: “We started Tabby because we believed money should be flexible enough to work around your life, not the other way around. That belief hasn’t changed, but what we’re doing about it has. We’re building a place where people have full control over their money, with the same clarity and flexibility they’ve come to expect from us.”
Tabby said UAE credit cards typically charge 30-46% annual interest and that sending money abroad through banks can cost more than AED 75 before exchange markups, the frictions it says the account is built to reduce. International transfers aren’t yet live on Tabby Cash.
First product under new licence
Tabby Cash is the first product Tabby has issued under a Stored Value Facilities (SVF) licence granted by the Central Bank of the UAE. SVFs are regulated under a CBUAE regulation first issued in November 2020 to bring prepaid and e-money instruments under central bank supervision, separate from the licences that govern Tabby’s core instalment-payment business.
Comes after $4.5bn valuation
The launch follows a run of large funding events for Tabby.
- In February 2025, the company raised a $160 million Series E led by Blue Pool Capital and Hassana Investment Company, valuing it at $3.3 billion, a round TechCrunch reported at the time was explicitly earmarked to fund Tabby’s expansion beyond BNPL.
- In October 2025, early investors sold shares in a secondary transaction co-led by HSG and Boyu Capital that valued the company at $4.5 billion, up from $3.3 billion eight months earlier.
- Tabby has reportedly engaged HSBC, JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley to support a public listing in Saudi Arabia.
Part of a regional pattern
Tabby isn’t the only Gulf BNPL provider broadening its licence base. In March 2025, Saudi Arabia’s central bank, SAMA, granted Tamara a full consumer finance licence covering both BNPL and consumer finance activity, allowing it to offer financing above the SAR 5,000 threshold that applied to its earlier BNPL-only licence.
Sophie Guibaud, an IFC nominee director and co-chair of the Saudi chapter of the Mena Fintech Association, has described BNPL as “the most visible face” of the Gulf’s wider embedded finance shift, “because you see it everywhere and the user numbers are significant.”
She has argued the region’s absence of legacy banking infrastructure is accelerating that shift, telling Fintech TV that consumers can now “access financial services, insurance, and investments where and when they need them,” rather than being tied to a single bank.
Tabby said Tabby Cash will roll out to its full UAE customer base in the coming weeks, after which the flat 3% cashback promotion is due to revert to the standard 1%-3% tiered structure on 1 November 2026.
