Saudi FinTech Hala acquires Paymennt.com
Saudi FinTech Hala expands its payment offering with the purchase of Paymennt.com.
The deal, announced in a press release on Wednesday (February 15), will help Hala’s small and medium-sized business (SMB) customers process payments online and offline.
“We are excited to welcome the Paymennt team to our family to join us in executing our shared vision,” Hala co-founder Maher Loubieh said in the release. “The trigger was simple, we met smart entrepreneurs who share a similar vision and who are building a complementary product that clearly fits into our strategy.”
Hala serves more than 50,000 SMEs, primarily in Saudi Arabia, and processes more than $3 billion in transactions per year as the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region looks for solutions to handle the rapid digitization of payments in that part of the world.
PYMNTS explored this phenomenon in December in a conversation with Saad Ansari, co-founder and CEO of MENA-focused FinTech company XPence.
Largely underserved by banks, which tend to go after larger companies, Ansari said SMEs are attracted to XPence’s multi-functional management platform, which provides a level of oversight and control over their finances that many companies could not otherwise achieve.
“We don’t just focus on their debts or on their receivables. We bring both elements into play because ultimately we want to know the net cash position of the company at all times,” Ansari told PYMNTS at the time.
While acknowledging growing global competition, he argued that many of the platforms created for other markets do not translate well in the MENAP context, giving Xpence a competitive edge in the region.
“FinTech doesn’t travel very well across borders,” he noted, citing the unique challenges of the fragmented MENA market.
Founded in 2017 and based in the United Arab Emirates, Paymennt.com serves more than 2,000 micro and small and medium enterprises.
As PYMNTS wrote last year, the UAE has emerged as a center for FinTech innovation, home to two bustling centers of international finance, Dubai and Abu Dhabi.
Together with India, the United Arab Emirates last year signed the Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA) which aims to help build bridges between the business communities of the two countries while expanding trade.
Another major factor fueling the UAE’s rapid acceleration in FinTech innovation has been at the government level, with millions being plugged into the startup ecosystem in recent years via sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) such as the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA), which has almost 700 dollars. billion in assets.
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