Tabby has raised $233 million at a $6.5 billion valuation as it expands beyond buy now pay later into a broader range of financial services. Growth at that speed puts pressure on everything underneath it. Card issuing, data, fraud controls and local payment rails all have to scale together.

At Money20/20 Middle East in Riyadh, Bassel Sabri speaks with Peter Theunis, Principal Advisor at Paymentology, one year after the company set up its commercial presence in Saudi Arabia.

Theunis explains why resilience is the first thing tested when a fintech scales, meaning 24/7 availability at 99.99% uptime. He covers why a processor should stay focused on what it does best rather than chase every new direction. He also explains why quarterly planning conversations with clients let infrastructure scale ahead of demand rather than behind it. Saudi Arabia counts roughly 57 million cards and more than SAR 1.2 trillion in annual card spending. Even so, he argues the question is no longer how many cards there are but the rise of tokens: single-use, purpose-specific credentials that reduce risk and open the way for embedded finance.

His test for Saudi fintech’s next stage: a company that has proven its core product with profitability, not only growth, and is now building platforms that can scale.

Topics: Paymentology’s first year in Saudi Arabia, localisation and compliance, resilience and uptime, platform focus, scaling volume vs. scaling products, fraud tools, tokenisation, embedded finance, profitability as the next signal.

Guest: Peter Theunis, Principal Advisor, Paymentology
Host: Bassel Sabri