How Tabby automated merchant KYB in the UAE and Middle East
of merchant KYB checks automated, replacing a fully manual process with an AI agent-driven flow.
of merchant applicants flagged for sanctions, ownership, or document authenticity issues before activation.
Four point-solution vendors consolidated into a single AiPrise integration across the region.
Tabby is the leading buy now, pay later platform in the Middle East, founded in 2019 by Hosam Arab and Daniil Barkalov and headquartered in Dubai. The company serves over 15 million consumers across the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait through a merchant network of 40,000+ retailers, including Adidas, IKEA, SHEIN, and seven of the ten largest retail groups in the GCC. Tabby has raised over $600M from investors including PayPal, Sequoia Capital India, STV, Mubadala Investment Capital, and Blue Pool Capital, reaching a valuation of $3.3B. In April 2026, Tabby secured a Stored Value Facilities licence from the Central Bank of the UAE, deepening its regulated footprint as it scales its merchant base across the region.
Manual merchant KYB stitched together from multiple vendors
Onboarding merchants across the UAE and the wider Middle East, Tabby was running KYB by hand against a patchwork of point solutions:
- Fully manual merchant KYB with ops teams pulling business records, trade licences, and ownership documents one by one for every new retailer in the pipeline.
- Four disconnected vendors for trade licence retrieval, UBO documentation, business contact data, and screening, each with its own integration, format, and SLA.
- Bilingual document review with trade licences, MOAs, and incorporation documents arriving in both Arabic and English, requiring human reviewers fluent in both to extract and verify data.
- UBO KYC across diverse documents including Emirates IDs, GCC national IDs, and passports from across the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia, with no unified verification flow.
One API and AI agents for end-to-end merchant KYB
AiPrise replaced Tabby's four-vendor patchwork with a single integration powered by AI agents purpose-built for KYB:
- Document Insights AI agent reads and extracts data from Tabby's merchant documents in both Arabic and English, including trade licences, MOAs, and incorporation papers, eliminating manual bilingual review.
- Direct trade licence and registry connections across the UAE (DED, mainland and free zones), Saudi Arabia, and the wider MiddleEast, returning structured business data in real time.
- UBO discovery and KYC that maps shareholders, identifies natural-person owners, and runs Emirates ID, GCC ID, and passport verification in one flow.
- AML screening and business enrichment combining sanctions, PEP, and adverse media checks with phone, email, and web presence data, replacing four separate vendors with a single API call.
Middle East registry depth meets AI-native KYB.
Tabby needed a partner that could replace a stack of four single-purpose vendors with one integration powered by AI agents that handle Arabic and English documents natively. AiPrise brought direct registry connections across the UAE and broader Middle East, the Document Insights AI agent for bilingual document parsing, and UAE data residency through our me-central-1 region. The result is an 80% automated merchant KYB flow that scales with Tabby's merchant network across the GCC.
With AiPrise, Tabby went from manual, four-vendor merchant KYB to 80% automated onboarding powered by AI agents across the UAE and the Middle East.
