Editor-in-Chief's Letter

Buy-now-pay-later has become one of the region's fastest-growing sectors — and Tabby is leading it. Six years ago, most Gulf shoppers paid cash on delivery. Today, a growing share of them are paying in four installments. Co-founder Hosam Arab has built the checkout twice — once for Namshi, which defined how the Gulf shops online, and once for Tabby, which defined how it pays. Trained as an engineer, he moved through early roles at Schlumberger and GE, an MBA at Harvard, and time in advisory and private equity at Waha Capital — a range of experience that gave him exposure to both the technical and financial sides of building a company before he built one of his own. That opportunity arrived in 2011 with Namshi. Online fashion retail was still a new category in the Gulf, and the logistics networks built for e-commerce at scale didn't yet exist. Arab and his co-founders built much of Namshi's infrastructure on top of Aramex, laying groundwork for the region's digital retail sector as they scaled the business itself. Over eight years, Namshi grew into one of the Gulf's defining e-commerce successes, expanding across the UAE, Saudi Arabia and the wider GCC. Then, Arab founded Tabby — a buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) platform that arrived at a moment when the Gulf's retail landscape was defined by…