PayTabs, a Saudi payments company originally backed by the venture arm of Saudi Aramco, has agreed to acquire Amazon Payment Services' operations across the Middle East and North Africa in a deal valued at more than $100 million. The purchase folds a nine-market merchant-payments business that Amazon inherited from Souq.com into PayTabs, forming what the two companies describe as the region's largest payments infrastructure provider.

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The payments business Amazon has agreed to sell in the Middle East did not start under its own name. It began as PayFort, a regional gateway that Amazon absorbed through its 580 million dollar purchase of the online marketplace Souq.com in 2017 and later renamed Amazon Payment Services. That operation is now being sold to PayTabs, a Saudi payments firm, in a transaction valued at more than 100 million dollars, according to a joint statement from the two companies.

Both companies have approved the acquisition, though the exact price has not been disclosed, and closing terms and regulatory timelines remain unspecified. Once complete, the combined business is expected to process more than 150 billion Saudi riyals, roughly 40 billion dollars, in transactions each year, a scale the companies say would make PayTabs the largest payments infrastructure provider in the region.

What Amazon Is Selling

Amazon Payment Services is the system used by merchants to accept money, not to be confused with a consumer wallet. It runs across nine markets in the region and serves more than 3,500 businesses, letting them take international card networks including Visa and Mastercard alongside domestic schemes such as mada in Saudi Arabia, KNET in Kuwait, and Meeza in Egypt. Its systems handle transaction processing, fraud monitoring, multi-currency conversion, payment links, and instalment options, across sectors that range from aviation and travel to retail, insurance, real estate, and government, according to reporting by Payment Expert and Fintech Futures.

For Amazon, the sale sheds a licence-heavy, capital-intensive operation that sat outside its core commerce and cloud businesses. Running regulated payment rails across nine countries means maintaining separate approvals, banking relationships, and compliance regimes in each is work that global platforms have increasingly started handing over to regional specialists. Selling the unit lets Amazon step away from that obligation while handing the reigns over to an established local operator to run it.

A Saudi Consolidator Emerges

PayTabs describes itself as a payments infrastructure company built to make transactions simple, secure, and scalable for merchants and to widen financial inclusion across the region. It was founded in Saudi Arabia in 2014 by Abdulaziz Al Jouf, who has said the idea took shape on a Starbucks napkin after he struggled to find a working payment gateway for an earlier venture, and it processed its first live transaction that year. The company was originally backed by Wa'ed, the entrepreneurship and venture arm of Saudi Aramco, and later by private Saudi investment. From offices across the Gulf and a presence reaching into Egypt, Turkey, and Asia, it has assembled a full stack of processing, invoicing, QR, and point-of-sale tools, among them PT Touch, a 2021 product that turns smartphones into card terminals.

Recent years have seen PayTabs buy its way to greater scale. The Amazon agreement follows its April 2026 purchase of the UAE contactless specialist TAPn'GO, the acquisition of Saudi point-of-sale provider Digital Pay, the buyout of Turkey's social-commerce platform Paymes, and a move to full ownership of its Egyptian operation. Each deal added a component, and the Amazon transaction is the largest, extending PayTabs into merchant relationships and bank connections it did not previously hold.

The purchase adds to a wider consolidation of payments across the Gulf and North Africa, where digital transaction volumes are climbing and merchants increasingly want processing, currency handling, and local compliance from a single supplier. Currently, payments in the region remain divided among national card schemes and separate regulators, which makes merging a multi-country operation slow and legally intricate. Both companies said continuity would be a priority during integration, with minimal disruption for existing clients and faster merchant onboarding.

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