Saudi-founded PayTabs has agreed to acquire Amazon Payment Services’ Middle East and North Africa operations in a deal valued at more than $100m.
PayTabs Group has agreed to acquire Amazon Payment Services’ operations across the Middle East and North Africa in a transaction valued at more than $100m (USD), according to reports by GCC Business News and ArabFounders among other regional media.
Both parties have approved the deal, the reports said, though an exact price nor a completion date was disclosed.
The agreement would fold Amazon Payment Services’ regional payments business into PayTabs’ platform. The combined business would process more than SAR150bn ($40bn) a year, according to the reports.
PayTabs: a larger regional processor
PayTabs runs payment processing, automated transaction switching, foreign exchange and payouts on a single platform. The company, founded in Saudi Arabia in 2014 by Abdulaziz Al Jouf, operates in Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Egypt. The acquisition is understood to make PayTabs the largest payments infrastructure provider in MENA.
Amazon Payment Services currently operates in nine MENA countries and serves more than 3,500 businesses, according to the company. Its products include online payment acceptance, local payment methods, payment links and instalments, and it processes transactions across industries including aviation, travel, retail, insurance, real estate and government.
Accessing these merchant relationships and bank connections would extend PayTabs’ reach into markets that use different currencies and payment methods.
Customer and operational continuity would reportedly remain a priority for PayTabs during integration, with limited disruption expected as the business expects to speed up merchant onboarding and strengthen local compliance.
Amazon steps back from MENA payments
The sale would end Amazon’s direct ownership of a standalone payment processor in the region nine years after it entered the market. Amazon acquired Payfort in 2017 as part of its roughly $580m purchase of the e-commerce group Souq.com, then rebranded the gateway as Amazon Payment Services in 2020.
Payfort launched in 2013 as one of the region’s early fintech firms. Its bank partners have included First Abu Dhabi Bank, Mashreq, RAKBANK, Al Rajhi Bank, Riyad Bank and The Saudi British Bank, alongside the Mada and Meeza card schemes and Visa and Mastercard.
Amazon has not stated its reasons for the sale or its plans for its remaining regional payments activity.
The deal adds to consolidation among MENA payments providers as digital transaction volumes rise and merchants seek local processing and compliance from a single supplier. It would follow PayTabs’ April 2026 purchase of the UAE contactless firm TAPn’GO and its 2022 acquisition of the Turkish social-commerce platform Paymes.
Payments across the region remain divided between national systems with separate rules and card schemes, which raises the work involved in merging a multi-country operation.
No timeline for integrating the two platforms has been published, and the deal may require regulatory clearance in several markets before it completes.
