How painful is it to take the fight to @amazon?

In 2022, @noon, @amazon’s only serious competitor in the MENA region, set fire to $2.3m dollars every single day, bringing their three year total to:

-$1.92billion 🤯

Here’s a breakdown

⏬ In 2022, noon’s losses accelerated by 40% to $862.39m

@PIFSaudi’s share was SAR 1.62 billion or $431.47m

How much money has @noon, @Amazon’s only serious competitor in the MENA region, lost over the last two years?

-$1.05 billion 🤯

Here’a a breakdown

⏬ In 2020, noon lost $424.81m

@PIFSaudi’s share was SAR 798 million or $212.40m

👋 I’m super excited to officially announce @Nomod, an idea that we’ve been quietly working on since late 2019

Nomod is a beautifully easy way for merchants around the world to accept card payments on their phone with no extra hardware 💳📲

https://twitter.com/TechCrunch/status/1460187833851949057

We were privileged to be part of @ycombinator’s S21 batch earlier this summer, which turned out to be an incredibly inspiring and productive time 🙏

https://twitter.com/okassim/status/1433047447077638144

One of the unexpected winners of @Rivian’s IPO is JIMCO, the investment subsidiary of @ALJCorporate, a 76 year old family business based out of KSA

If rumour be true, what started as a seed cheque of $100k, eventually became a $303m investment, that.. …at the top end of the revised pricing range will be worth $8.2bn, a 27x return!

Read on for the breakdown 👇

🔍 It looks like @transferwise has lost or has killed off its UAE banking relationship with @AGTBltd

Given the UAE Central bank’s recently updated, detailed regs on Stored Value, centralbank.ae/sites/default/… (PDF), perhaps a move onshore is in order

https://twitter.com/LouisLebbos/status/1332263450626625536

⚡️ @transferwise killing off multi-currency accounts entirely for anyone with a UAE address, citing a "regulatory update"

Pretty much sums up the sorry state of UAE fintech 😖

🔎 In early October @noon quietly pushed out its latest foray, @noonpay_uae (+ @noonpay_ksa), a consumer wallet play that has been much rumoured about for at least a couple of years

https://twitter.com/noonpay_uae/status/1313496450710605826

In the UAE, this sets @noon’s sights on an increasingly crowded field including @careem Pay, incumbents such as @eWalletAE (Noor Bank / DIB + @etisalat), PayIt (@FABConnects), and new entrants such as @MamoPay, @PayByOfficial (G42 = @ToTokMessenger), @yapthemoneyapp, & Ziina

⚡️ A little over a year on, it unfortunately looks like @AWOKcom quietly slipped into liquidation earlier this summer

https://twitter.com/MENAbytes/status/1115200449827700737

1. Awok.com, broken and not redirecting correctly
2. Broken images on their AE subdomain
3. This reddit /r/dubai post has some bits of anecdotal evidence, reddit.com/r/dubai/commen… (and much idle speculation)
4. Social media last updated in late May

A handful of interesting takeaways from the Hushpuppi saga

1/ Ray had an FZ entity and a visa from Fujairah, but was living it large in Dubai. This very pattern has created a myriad of compliance complexity for local banks and has resulted in a number effectively shutting the.. ..door on all but the most tenacious of SMEs

2/ In April, the FATF identified that the UAE has 39 different corporate registries (the total FZ count is a touch higher), all with different standards and variable levels of competence.

fatf-gafi.org/media/fatf/doc… (PDF)

⚡️ It’s been three years since we folded @JadoPado into @noon. So much has changed, but much has also stayed the same. A thread looking back at what once was :)

Kicking off with a design concept from late September 2016, that went live very late in December vs @noon’s current UI Our first building block was @halarewich’s incredibly nice PHP based cart software, Lemonstand. We grabbed a license for $210, rolled up our sleeves and got cracking

⚡️ Three GCC @Affirm / @AfterPayAU / @Klarna equivalents to keep an eye on:

1. @paywithtabby, tabby.ai, $2m raised
2. @postpayofficial, postpay.io, >$500K raised
3. Spotii, spotii.me Eight months on, @paywithtabby has raised a further $7m, taking it’s total to $9m, whilst also taking a clear lead in the space

menabytes.com/tabby-7-millio…

Banking and telco is broken in the UAE. So much so that it is hurting our economy.

A thread

1/17 Two weeks ago, I used five different services on a single day for calls with various people around the world.

I wasn’t planning any nefarious activities nor attempting to skirt around paying my fair share, just talking to vendors as part of my work on a new venture

2/17