PayTabs, a Mena and South Asia payments provider, has acquired a 100 per cent stake in Paymes, Turkey’s largest social commerce platform.
The news of the acquisition follows PayTabs’s acquisition of Saudi Arabia’s Digital Pay last month.
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.”
Under the terms of the acquisition, Paymes will serve as PayTabs’s social commerce platform to bolster numerous freelancers, artisans, consultants, home-based business owners, personal trainers and micro vendors across the Mena region to receive instant payments.
For PayTabs, the acquisition accords with their fervent pursuit to elevate merchants’ payment habits.
After collaborating for more than a year to launch social commerce tools in Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Egypt, the PayTabs founders decided that acquiring Paymes was instrumental for PayTabs’s goal of nurturing the global e-commerce economy.
After operating digital payments in the Mena region for a decade, the synergy with Paymes will strive to open new social media platforms such as Messenger, Facebook, and Instagram for merchants that trade and sell over social media but have no legitimate means of collecting their funds.
Likewise, the acquisition will help PayTabs to 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 September, PayTabs teamed up with Egypt’s buy-now-pay-later fintech valU and with notchnco, an independent software vendor, to enable customers to shop via Whatsapp.
Last year, PayTabs launched “PT Touch”, the first soft point-of-sale solution in the Mena market to transform smartphones into merchant point-of-sale terminals.
Paymes, which currently serves more than 850,000 users across Turkey and Azerbaijan, will tap into the market prowess of PayTabs to develop digital and social payments in the Mena region.
Paymes co-founder and PayTabs regional head and 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.”
Paymes is a fintech start-up and a global payment platform that allows individuals and institutions to easily receive payments and conduct e-commerce without prior e-commerce or financial literacy knowledge. It eliminates application dependency and is available without the need for high budget requirements.
