• Saudi Arabia-based fintech PayTabs, has fully acquired Turkish social commerce platform Paymes for an unknown amount.
• Under the terms of the acquisition, Paymes will serve as PayTabs' social commerce platform for freelancers, artisans, consultants, home-based business owners, personal trainers and micro vendors across Mena to receive instant payments.
• Founded in 2014 by Abdulaziz Al Jouf, PayTabs is a payments solutions provider that offers a payment gateway for online stores. Meanwhile, Paymes, founded in 2017, is a payment platform that allows individuals and institutions to easily receive payments and conduct e-commerce, which operates in Turkey, Azerbaijan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE.
• Last November, PayTabs acquired Saudi point of sale (POS) provider Digital Pay.

Press release:

PayTabs, Middle East, Africa, and South Asia’s (MEASA’s) award-winning payments powerhouse, in a power play, announced that it had acquired a 100% stake in Paymes, Turkey’s largest social commerce platform. The news of the acquisition comes just weeks after PayTabs acquired Saudi Arabia’s Digital Pay in November 2022.

Under the terms of the acquisition, Paymes will serve as PayTabs social commerce platform empowering millions of freelancers, artisans, consultants, home-based business owners, personal trainers and micro vendors across the Middle East and Africa to receive instant payments. For PayTabs, the acquisition is in sync with their passionate pursuit of following merchants across their lifecycles to elevate their payment habits. Micro merchants have been an underserved segment in the ecosystem and Paymes, with its simplex social commerce platform provides the key for webpreneurs to enter the main-stream payment market by enabling them to create web stores and sell online with minimum effort. After collaborating for over a year to launch social commerce tools in KSA, UAE and Egypt, the founders decided that PayTabs acquiring Paymes was the next logical step in line with PayTabs mission to power the global e-commerce economy with the ultimate super payment’s platform.

Having championed digital payments in the MENA region for a decade the synergy with Paymes will open new social media platforms such as Messenger, Facebook, and Instagram for millions of merchants that trade and sell over social media but have no legitimate way of collecting their funds. The acquisition provides an opportunity for PayTabs to grow and expand its payment footprint in the Eurasian markets, with futuristic market differentiators offered by the Paymes platform, such as live cashier inventory management and Paymes Reels.

In the Turkish region, this acquisition allows Paymes to elevate itself as a “social commerce processor.” Paymes, which currently serves over 850,000 users across Turkey and Azerbaijan will capitalize on the market presence of PayTabs to advance digital and social payments in the MENA region. One of the key benefits of Paymes is that it allows users to set up a mini e-commerce webstore – known as the ‘Paymes shop'. The web store can be customized and branded saving additional costs for merchants who would otherwise pay to have their websites designed and developed via professional agencies. This ease of this feature alone will give weight to empowering a new segment of women entrepreneurs who run micro home-based businesses selling over WhatsApp for example, to participate in the economy, thus contributing to growing household incomes via social commerce.

Speaking in Istanbul, Paymes Co-founder and PayTabs Regional Head/Operating Partner, Hasan Jabbrov said, “Under the acquisition agreement, the Paymes team will expand our responsibilities to cover the many markets that PayTabs operates in throughout MENA. We will also be supporting PayTabs with our range of new social commerce products, a sector in which we have considerable experience. Exciting times ahead for webpreneurs in the region.”

At the PayTabs Headquarters in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, founder and CEO of the PayTabs Group, Abdulaziz Al Jouf said, “Payments are a commodity and our mission at PayTabs is to ensure that payments are easily made available to every customer segment from the super merchant or bank to a nano merchant. By acquiring Paymes, we are consolidating our position as the only payment solutions powerhouse that has a payment orchestration platform to offer payments solutions for any business size – micro or macro, across the globe.”

In Istanbul, Sabrican Zaim, the co-founder and CEO of Paymes said, "By the number of merchants and know-how that we gained from social commerce, we are preparing to launch various spin-offs on specific verticals. In addition to these spin-offs, we are developing payment mechanisms through live broadcasts with reels in social commerce, which is our strongest muscle. We believe Paymes is an enabler with an accelerator effect for payment platforms and e-commerce startups. Our cooperation as a Facebook commerce partner strengthens us. We are targeting to improve the cash flows of our merchants by providing them with buy now pay later, consumer finance and even a special Paymes Card. As the most preferred social commerce platform of the region, under PayTabs global vision we are targeting to serve more merchants in all continents.” 

Uzbekistan, Jordan, and Georgia are new markets on the horizon for the launch of Paymes in 2023.

Although the valuation of the acquisition deal remains undisclosed, the global social commerce market is expected to grow to more than $2 trillion by 2025 driven by the buying habits of millennials and Gen Z.