Tamara, Saudi Arabia's leading buy-now-pay-later platform, has secured a Shari'ah-compliant asset-backed facility of up to $2.4 billion from a group of lenders including Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and funds affiliated with Apollo Global Management, the company announced at the Money 20/20 Middle East conference on 15 September 2025.
The transaction refinances and substantially upsizes a prior $500 million facility, making it nearly five times larger than the arrangement it replaces. An initial tranche of $1.4 billion is available immediately, with a further $1 billion accessible over a three-year period, providing Tamara with a substantial and flexible capital base to fund the consumer receivables generated by its buy-now-pay-later business at scale.
A LANDMARK DEAL FOR MENA STRUCTURED FINANCE
Tamara described the facility as the largest asset-backed financing of its type in the Middle East and North Africa, a characterisation that reflects both the size of the transaction and its Shari'ah-compliant structure. Asset-backed facilities of this kind are funded against a pool of consumer receivables — in Tamara's case, the instalment loans it extends to customers purchasing from merchants on its platform — with the quality and performance of that receivables pool determining the terms on which lenders are willing to commit capital.
The ability to attract $2.4 billion from institutions of the calibre of Goldman Sachs, Citi, and Apollo indicates that Tamara's receivables portfolio has satisfied the detailed underwriting and credit analysis requirements of some of the world's most sophisticated institutional lenders and investment funds. The scale of the facility relative to the $500 million arrangement it replaces also signals confidence in the continued growth of the underlying loan book, with the three-year availability window on the additional $1 billion tranche designed to accommodate that expansion without forcing premature refinancing.
Tamara said it now serves more than 20 million customers and facilitates transactions across a merchant base of more than 87,000 businesses, making it one of the largest consumer credit platforms in the Gulf Cooperation Council region. Those figures provide context for the scale of receivables the company is now capable of generating and securitising against institutional funding.
SHARI'AH STRUCTURE OPENS BROADER CAPITAL MARKETS
The Shari'ah-compliant structure of the facility is commercially significant in the Saudi and broader Gulf context, where a substantial share of institutional and retail capital is subject to Islamic finance requirements. By engineering the transaction to comply with Shari'ah principles, Tamara has demonstrated the ability to access structured financing in a form compatible with the preferences of Islamic investors and lenders — a capability that substantially widens the potential investor base for any future structured finance activity the company may undertake.
The involvement of Goldman Sachs, Citi, and Apollo-affiliated funds on the lender side brings global institutional validation to the transaction and underlines international investors' appetite for exposure to consumer credit in the MENA region as digital payment adoption and e-commerce penetration continue to expand. For Tamara, the facility provides capital runway sufficient to sustain growth through the next phase of competition in a BNPL market where several players are vying for merchant and consumer relationships, whilst the long tenor of the available facility reduces the refinancing pressure that shorter-term structures can impose on fast-growing lending platforms.