RIGHT PLACE, RIGHT TIME

Abdullah Aldabbous, Founder and CEO of MyFatoorah, hit on an opportune idea at an ideal moment when he set up the Kuwait-based digital payments gateway in 2016. Having seen business boom in recent years, he’s now thinking of new ways to innovate.

- CLAUDINE COLETTI

Pre-pandemic, Fintech companies were riding a slow-but-steady wave in the Middle East as traditional businesses gradually turned to digital transformation, but 2020 lit a fire under their feet. Suddenly every business needed to adopt online payments, and they needed to do it fast.

For Kuwaiti digital payments gateway MyFatoorah, the impact was gamechanging. “Pre-pandemic, things were going good, ecommerce was growing, people wanted to shift online—but not everybody,” remembers MyFatoorah’s founder and CEO, Abdullah Aldabbous. “Once Covid hit, they shifted like lightning. The numbers were crazy.”

In 2020, MyFatoorah executed payments worth a total of $1.6 billion, up from $540 million in 2019—an increase of 196%. In 2021, this figure shot up again by 81% to hit nearly $2.9 billion. By the end of last year, the company’s app had been downloaded 255,000 times and had over 60,500 active users. Recent results have come as a relief. “We were afraid, thinking if life goes back to normal we will have a slowdown, but our numbers nearly doubled,” admits the CEO. “This is because our existing customers also grew; they never went back.”