Saudi Arabian buy-now-pay-later company Tamara announced a $2.4 billion asset-backed financing facility at the Money20/20 Middle East conference in September 2025, marking the largest asset-backed financing transaction completed by a fintech company anywhere in the MENA region. The facility was provided by Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and funds managed by Apollo Global Management, a consortium that brings together leading investment banking capability with substantial alternative credit capacity, reflecting the institutional-quality perception that the lenders hold of Tamara's consumer receivables portfolio.
The new arrangement refinances and materially upsizes a prior $500 million facility that Goldman Sachs had previously provided to Tamara on a bilateral basis. The step from $500 million to $2.4 billion represents close to a fivefold increase in committed debt funding, a transformation in the scale of the company's balance sheet capacity that tracks the significant growth Tamara has delivered in its gross merchandise volume and consumer loan origination since the original facility was established.
STRUCTURE PROVIDES IMMEDIATE AND DEFERRED CAPACITY
Under the terms of the new facility, $1.4 billion is available to Tamara for immediate deployment against its existing and pipeline receivables, providing the company with substantial liquidity to fund near-term origination growth without the need to return to capital markets in the short term. An additional $1 billion is accessible on a deferred basis over a three-year period, giving Tamara the flexibility to draw on committed capital in line with the actual pace of portfolio expansion rather than taking on debt ahead of demand and incurring unnecessary carry costs. The facility runs to August 2029, providing a multi-year funding horizon that materially reduces refinancing risk and supports longer-term balance sheet planning.
Asset-backed financing is the standard and most efficient funding mechanism for buy-now-pay-later and broader consumer lending businesses, as it allows the company to raise debt directly against the pool of consumer receivables it originates rather than borrowing on an unsecured corporate basis. The structure is attractive to lenders of the calibre of Goldman Sachs, Citi, and Apollo because the receivables serve as specific collateral that can be ring-fenced from the broader corporate entity, and because it enables the fintech to achieve a blended cost of funds that more accurately reflects the underlying credit quality of the consumer loans rather than the higher risk premium associated with unsecured corporate debt.
TAMARA'S POSITION IN THE MENA BNPL MARKET
Tamara is one of the two leading buy-now-pay-later providers in Saudi Arabia and the wider Gulf Co-operation Council region, competing principally with Tabby, which operates a comparable business model and has pursued a similar growth trajectory since its own founding. The MENA BNPL market has expanded rapidly as a younger and digitally engaged consumer population has adopted instalment-based payment options for e-commerce purchases and increasingly for in-store transactions, supported by high smartphone penetration rates, growing merchant acceptance infrastructure, and a regulatory environment in Saudi Arabia that has been progressively updated to accommodate the emergence of digital credit products.
The $2.4 billion facility positions Tamara with a significant and durable funding advantage relative to domestic rivals and sends a clear signal to the market that three of the world's most prominent financial institutions regard the company's consumer credit assets as meeting investment-grade quality standards. The announcement at Money20/20 Middle East, one of the leading specialist conferences for the regional fintech and banking communities, ensured the deal received prominent visibility among the most important industry and investor audiences in the region. The transaction's scale also reflects the broader maturation of MENA's fintech funding ecosystem, where asset-backed transactions of this magnitude were effectively unprecedented only a few years ago.