First Principles
Six million customers. Launched 2020.
In the Global South, you do not import the installment. You rebuild it from the way the market already pays.
Consumer credit built for a cash economy has to start from scratch, not from a Western template.
Saudi Arabia paid mostly in cash, with thin card penetration, so the installment could not simply sit on top of a card. In Riyadh in 2020, Abdulmajeed Alsukhan and his co-founders built Tamara to let a shopper split a purchase - simple, interest-free, and Sharia-aligned. It now serves more than six million customers across some 15,000 partner merchants in the Kingdom.
The decision that mattered: design the payment method from inside a cash-first, faith-first market, not around a card most people never held.
The Global South rebuilds the installment from the way its market already pays.
Source: Tamara, 2024-2025.