News

Paymob Partners With Tamara For Seamless BNPL Payments

The partnership is designed to fuel the growth of small and medium-sized enterprises across the MENA region.

Published

1 year ago

January 9, 2024

Nour Nasir

Paymob

Leading MENA financial services enabler, Paymob has announced a new partnership with Tamara, the GCC region’s premier shopping and payments platform.

The strategic venture integrates Tamara’s Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) service with Paymob’s secure payment gateway, allowing customers to split payments without hidden fees or interest. Paymob’s infrastructure is already used by 250,000 merchants across the MENA region and Pakistan, while Tamara boasts over nine million registered users and 30,000+ merchants.

Although the two companies already have partnerships with some of the region’s best-known brands, the new agreement is designed to fuel the growth of small and medium-sized enterprises. With Tamara’s BNPL solution, merchants typically improve conversions by 15% and gain a 40% increase in average order value. In addition, the likelihood of a customer making repeat purchases climbs by 50%.

The integration of Tamara’s BNPL solution to Paymob’s eCommerce gateway works via a simple software upgrade. The service will initially roll out to merchants in the KSA and UAE in its first phase, with more countries added in future stages.

Islam Shawky, Co-founder and CEO of Paymob explained that “[the] partnership with Tamara delivers on Paymob’s mission to fuel SME growth in the digital economy. There is a massive opportunity to enable merchants in the GCC to capitalize on the power of alternative payment methods, and we are thrilled to partner with Tamara to fuel this growth in MENA”.

Also Read: A Guide To Digital Payment Methods In The Middle East

Turki Bin Zarah, Co-founder and CCO of Tamara, added, “This partnership with Paymob provides seamless access to Tamara’s services to thousands of SMEs to enable their growth across the region. As a leading commerce enabler, we are revolutionizing how people shop, pay, and bank and are thrilled to partner with Paymob as we deliver on this goal”.

Tamara and Paymob are currently experiencing rapid growth after recent funding rounds. Riyadh-based Tamara secured a $150 million investment from Goldman Sachs, while Paymob’s growth has been driven by funding from PayPal Ventures.

News

Google Releases Veo 2 AI Video Tool To MENA Users

The state-of-the-art video generation model is now available in Gemini, offering realistic AI-generated videos with better physics, motion, and detail.

Published

5 days ago

April 16, 2025

Nour Nasir

Google

Starting today, users of Gemini Advanced in the MENA region — and globally — can tap into Veo 2, Google’s next-generation video model.

Originally unveiled in 2024, Veo 2 has now been fully integrated into Gemini, supporting multiple languages including Arabic and English. The rollout now brings Google’s most advanced video AI directly into the hands of everyday users.

Veo 2 builds on the foundations of its predecessor with a more sophisticated understanding of the physical world. It’s designed to produce high-fidelity video content with cinematic detail, realistic motion, and greater visual consistency across a wide range of subjects and styles. Whether recreating natural landscapes, human interactions, or stylized environments, the model is capable of interpreting and translating written prompts into eight-second 720p videos that feel almost handcrafted.

Users can generate content directly through the Gemini platform — either via the web or mobile apps. The experience is pretty straightforward: users enter a text-based prompt, and Veo 2 returns a video in 16:9 landscape format, delivered as an MP4 file. These aren’t just generic clips — they can reflect creative, abstract, or highly specific scenarios, making the tool especially useful for content creators, marketers, or anyone experimenting with visual storytelling.

Also Read: Getting Started With Google Gemini: A Beginner’s Guide

To ensure transparency, each video is embedded with SynthID — a digital watermark developed by Google’s DeepMind. The watermark is invisible to the human eye but persists across editing, compression, and sharing. It identifies the video as AI-generated, addressing concerns around misinformation and media authenticity.

While Veo 2 is still in its early phases of public rollout, the technology is part of a broader push by Google to democratize advanced AI tools. With text-to-image, code generation, and now video creation integrated into Gemini, Google is positioning the platform as a full-spectrum creative assistant.

Access to Veo 2 starts today and will continue expanding in the coming weeks. Interested users can try it out at gemini.google.com or through the Gemini app on Android and iOS.