Saudi payments company PayTabs Group has agreed to buy Amazon's payment-processing operations across the Middle East and North Africa for more than $100 million, a deal that hands a regional fintech consolidator the infrastructure Amazon built to move money for thousands of merchants and pulls the U.S. retail giant out of a business it entered nearly a decade ago through a much larger acquisition.
The unit being sold, Amazon Payment Services, processes transactions for more than 3,500 businesses across the region, supporting international card networks such as Visa and Mastercard alongside local payment rails including Mada in Saudi Arabia, Knet in Kuwait and Meeza in Egypt. Its roots trace back to PayFort, a Dubai-founded payments startup that Amazon absorbed as part of its $580 million cash acquisition of the e-commerce site Souq.com in 2017, before folding it into Amazon's own branding three years later.
Terms disclosed by both companies value the deal at "north of $100 million," according to trade publication The Paypers, though neither side has released a full breakdown of the transaction's structure or disclosed an expected closing date. PayTabs said the combined business, once integrated, is projected to process more than 150 billion Saudi riyals — roughly $40 billion — in payment volume annually, which the company says would make it the largest independent payments-infrastructure provider in the MENA region.
Rolling Up a Fragmented Market
The acquisition extends a buying spree PayTabs has pursued through 2026: the company has already acquired the UAE contactless-payments platform TAPn'GO, bought out its banking partner's stake in PayTabs Egypt, purchased Saudi point-of-sale provider Digital Pay, and picked up the Turkish social-commerce firm Paymes. Layering Amazon's licensed banking relationships and merchant base onto that portfolio gives PayTabs broader regulatory coverage and card-network connectivity across a region where payments infrastructure remains split among dozens of smaller, country-specific providers — a fragmentation that has long made cross-border expansion costly for merchants operating in more than one Gulf or North African market.
According to the companies' joint announcement, the transition is designed to minimize disruption for merchants currently processing payments through Amazon's platform, with existing integrations expected to migrate onto PayTabs' systems over time. For Amazon, the sale continues a pattern of divesting regional payments operations it acquired opportunistically during its earlier international expansion, rather than continuing to operate them as Amazon-branded services — mirroring similar retreats by other global platforms that have concluded specialized local providers can run domestic payments rails more efficiently than a foreign owner can.
Neither company has said what happens to Amazon Payment Services' existing staff or leadership once the deal closes, and regulatory approval in the multiple jurisdictions where the business operates has not been confirmed. If it closes as structured, the deal would leave PayTabs — a company still largely unknown outside Gulf fintech circles — controlling a meaningfully larger share of how money moves through one of the world's fastest-growing e-commerce regions.
