News
Paymob Announces New UAE Regional Hub
As the MENAP’s leading payment facilitator embarks on its next phase of expansion, it will open a new hub to serve the region’s growing number of micro businesses.
Paymob has just announced that it will expand into the United Arab Emirates and open a regional hub in the country after a successful round of Series B funding overseen by PayPal.
The UAE expansion will be focused on “empowering (SMEs) and microbusinesses across the seven Emirates, with best-in-class digital payments solutions that drive growth in the digital economy”, Paymob said in a recent press release.
Paymob has already appointed veteran Emirati financial services guru Omar Haddad as its General Manager for the UAE expansion. He’ll be responsible for building a 150-strong team of payment professionals in this new market.
“The UAE is a dynamic ecosystem that fosters entrepreneurship and innovation, largely enabled by tremendous support from the public sector. There are currently over 400,000 businesses in the UAE, 61% of which are microbusinesses and 38% are SMEs. We see a massive opportunity to serve this market segment. Our goal over the next three years is to empower 15% of those merchants with the latest payment technologies to fuel their growth and further digitize the economy,” says Islam Shawky, Paymob CEO and Co-founder.
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As a market leader in the digital payment sector in the MENAP region, Paymob currently caters to over 16.5 million registered users on its mobile wallet infrastructure. The company offers one of the most comprehensive payment platforms for MENAP businesses, and includes over 40 online and physical payment methods via its point-of-sale systems, online gateway, and app.
Paymob currently holds an 87% share of all of the mobile wallet processing volumes in Egypt, and in 2021, it partnered with Mastercard to offer the country’s first “Tap-on-Phone” contactless solution. The payments giant hopes to roll out the same tech to UAE businesses and their customers in 2023 and aims to help companies of all sizes deliver a frictionless and seamless digital payment experience.
News
Nano Banana 2 Arrives In MENA For Google Gemini Users
Google brings its latest image model to Gemini and Search, adding 4K output and tighter text control for regional users.
Google has opened access to Nano Banana 2 across the Middle East and North Africa, pushing its newest image model into everyday tools rather than keeping it inside the exclusive (and expensive) Pro tier.
The rollout spans the Google Gemini desktop and mobile apps, and extends to Google Search through Lens and AI Mode. Developers can also test it in preview via AI Studio and the Gemini API.
Nano Banana 2 runs on Gemini Flash, Google’s fast inference layer. The focus is speed, but also control. Users can export visuals from 512px up to 4K, adjusting aspect ratios for everything from vertical social posts to widescreen displays.
The model maintains character likeness across up to five figures and preserves fidelity for as many as 14 objects within a single workflow. This enables visual continuity across scenes, iterations, or edits — supporting projects like short films, storyboards, and multi-scene narratives. Text rendering has also been improved, delivering legible typography in mockups and greeting cards, with built-in translation and localization directly within images.
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Under the hood, the system taps Gemini’s broader knowledge base and pulls in real-time information and imagery from web search to render specific subjects more accurately. Lighting and fine detail have been upgraded, without slowing output.
By embedding the model inside Gemini and Search, Google is normalizing advanced image generation for a mass audience. In MENA, where startups and marketing teams are leaning heavily on AI to scale content across languages and borders, that shift lands at a practical moment.
The move also folds creative tooling deeper into search itself, so that image generation is no longer a separate workflow. It now sits right next to the query box.
Nano Banana 2 Arrives In MENA For Google Gemini Users
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