News

Club L London Teams With Checkout.com For Global Expansion

The fashion retailer plans to enhance global payments and expand into new markets using Shopify’s e-commerce platform.

Published

1 year ago

September 18, 2024

club l london teams with checkout.com to boost global expansion

Global payment provider Checkout.com, has announced a collaboration with Club L London, a rapidly expanding online fashion retailer, to improve its global payment capabilities.

Club L London, which operates through six dedicated international websites, has recently launched a new platform for the Middle East, and is relying on Checkout.com’s expertise to support its global growth. The partnership is particularly focused on the MENA region, where Checkout.com has offices in both Dubai and Riyadh, plus key licenses in the United Arab Emirates.

By choosing Checkout.com as its primary payment provider, Club L London benefits from a pre-built Shopify checkout solution and superior payment performance. Additionally, local acquiring services are available in the UAE, along with Shopify digital wallet integration, elevating the overall customer experience for shoppers.

Headquartered in Manchester, UK, Club L London offers affordable luxury womenswear with distinctive designs. The brand has a strong presence in the UK, US, France, Australia, and the UAE and specializes in prom dresses, maternity wear, bridal attire, and accessories. Club L has built a global community of diverse consumers, influencers, and content creators, consistently releasing new collections to meet the demands of its expanding audience.

Also Read: Top E-Commerce Websites In The Middle East In 2024

‍Remo Giovanni Abbondandolo, General Manager, MENA, Checkout.com, said: “We’re passionate about helping businesses thrive in the digital economy. Club L is a prime example of a tech-enabled brand that we can help to grow via high acceptance rates, smooth integration with its e-commerce platform, and leverage our leadership and knowledge position in the MENA region”‍.

‍Seb Green, Chief Technical Officer at Club L London, added: “We are always looking for ways to enhance the customer experience on our site by offering the best payment methods. Checkout.com’s integration is a perfect fit for us, presenting an exciting opportunity for us to expand into new markets with a leading payments provider”.

News

UAE-Built Falcon-H1 Arabic Leads LLM Benchmarks

The lean Emirati-built language model beats larger global systems and puts Arabic at the center of training.

Published

2 days ago

January 15, 2026

Nour Nasir

uae-built falcon-h1 arabic leads llm benchmarks

Abu Dhabi Technology Innovation Institute

Abu Dhabi’s Technology Innovation Institute has released an Arabic-first large language model that tops global test boards, an uncommon edge for a region long served by English-centric systems.

Falcon-H1 Arabic comes in 3B, 7B and 34B versions. The flagship posts 75.36% accuracy on comprehensive Arabic tasks and ranks first on the Open Arabic LLM Leaderboard. It also outperforms Meta’s Llama-70B and Alibaba’s Qwen-72B while using less than half their parameters. The smallest model beats Microsoft’s Phi-4 Mini by ten percentage points on equivalent benchmarks.

Arabic remains hard territory for AI. Flexible word order, dense morphology and constant switching between regional dialects and Modern Standard Arabic leave many global models missing context or tone. Academic research has pointed to a shortage of annotated datasets for dialect and informal speech. The impact shows up in classrooms, call centers and government portals where Arabic chatbots lag their English counterparts.

TII trained Falcon-H1 Arabic on formal writing, dialects and culturally grounded content. Beyond scores, it handles practical use: long conversations, reasoning rather than literal translation, and inputs of up to 192,000 words — enough for medical records or legal filings.

“The aim is innovation that is accessible, relevant, and impactful,” said Faisal Al Bannai, Adviser to the UAE President and Secretary-General of the Advanced Technology Research Council.

Also Read: Governata Raises $4M For Saudi AI Data-Governance Push

Arabic is spoken by more than 450 million people across over 20 countries, yet has often been treated as a secondary language for foundation models. The UAE move signals a push to flip that logic and build Arabic-native stacks rather than wait for global systems to improve.

Falcon models have led their categories since 2023. With H1 Arabic, TII is offering free access via chat.falconllm.tii.ae for developers, media, healthcare and public-sector users looking to automate in natural Arabic.

As the region continues to invest in sovereign computing and data localization, the addition of Falcon-H1 Arabic adds a powerful tool built for the native language, instead of an afterthought attached to an English-trained system.