Iran's BNPL Market, in Global Context

Iran in Context, No. 04. A comparison note. The Iran figures are ours, already published and held in the Tehran Index registry. The comparators are dated and carry their confidence tier.

Iran’s buy-now-pay-later market crossed a billion dollars a year without a single card network behind it, built entirely on domestic payment rails. That is a real achievement. It also serves a small slice of a market that, on its own numbers, is mostly untouched. This series does the same thing with any Iranian vertical: place the honest figure next to the peers an international reader already knows, and let the gap do the talking.

The comparison

The honest peers for a young BNPL market are not the giants born in the credit-card era. They are the platforms built, like Iran’s, for markets that skipped straight from cash and card-to-card transfer to instalments. Tabby, founded in the UAE and now live across the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar and Bahrain, reports more than 15 million users and over $10 billion a year in transaction volume. Tamara, founded in Saudi Arabia and now also live in the UAE and Kuwait, reports more than 14 million users. Both are 2025 company-reported figures, and both are private companies, so treat the scale as directional. For the category’s global leader, Klarna, now a public company, FY2025 results show 118 million active consumers and $127.9 billion in gross merchandise value across more than 45 countries, a different order of market entirely and the reference point, not the peer.

Scale the peer markets down to size and the gap sharpens rather than closes. Saudi Arabia alone, population about 34.6 million against Iran’s 92 million, saw an estimated $9.8 billion in BNPL volume in 2024, up 38 percent year over year, a market-research estimate we flag as directional (other firms put the 2026 figure anywhere from about $5 billion to $11 billion, a wide enough spread that the number should be read as an order of magnitude, not a fact). That is roughly eight times Iran’s entire national BNPL volume, from a country with well under half Iran’s population. Tabby and Tamara together already count close to 30 million users across a combined home-market population smaller than Iran’s alone. Iran’s own 5 to 6 million active users, against an estimated 40 million people who could plausibly use the product, is about 6 percent of that potential. The Gulf platforms are already deep into their addressable market; Iran’s is barely open.

Where Iran actually leads: the runway, and the rails it is built on

The honest strength in this data is not current scale, it is what is still unclaimed and what it is being built on. An estimated 40 million potential BNPL users against 5 to 6 million active ones is more open addressable market, in absolute people, than Tabby and Tamara’s entire combined user base today. And Iran built this without Visa, Mastercard or any card network behind it, the same domestic-rails achievement this desk has documented in payments generally (see The Walled Wallet). Growth, where it is measurable, backs the runway story: Digipay’s Codal-filed revenue more than doubled in FY1404 after already growing 2.1x the year before, group fintech momentum against a base most of the world has never priced in. Klarna’s FY2025 GMV grew 22 percent and Saudi Arabia’s BNPL market grew an estimated 38 percent; Iran’s leading credit platform is compounding faster off a smaller base, in a market that is, on its own numbers, still mostly empty.

Cautions, kept in view

Five, on the record. First, Iran’s $1.2 billion BNPL figure and 5 to 6 million user estimate are industry data at the reported tier, not an audited market total, and we treat them as directional, exactly as we did when we first published them. Second, Tabby and Tamara each serve several Gulf countries, so their user counts are not single-market totals the way Iran’s is, and the per-capita comparison above is therefore approximate. Third, Klarna spans more than 45 countries; its 118 million users is a scale reference for the category, not a fair single-market peer, the same caveat this series applied to Amazon and Jumia. Fourth, the Saudi Arabia market-size estimate carries real disagreement between research firms, roughly a two-times spread on the 2026 figure, so we show it once and flag the range rather than pick a side. Fifth, Digipay’s revenue figure covers its full product line, not BNPL in isolation, so its growth rate speaks to the group’s fintech momentum, not a clean BNPL metric; Tehran Index does not yet hold a BNPL-only revenue figure for any Iranian platform, and says so rather than estimate one.

Why it matters

A market that already moves a billion dollars a year and has, on its own numbers, reached roughly one in fifteen of the people who could plausibly use it, is not a story about a weak product. It is a story about how much room is left, in a country that already solved the harder problem of domestic payment rails without any of the infrastructure the Gulf platforms inherited. That is the fourth card in a series placing Iran’s leaders next to their global peers. The first three, Iran’s digital banks, Iran’s crypto adoption and Digikala, tell variations of the same story in other verticals. For the deeper domestic picture behind this one, see The 2% Problem in Iran’s $29B Lending Market; for the platform driving most of it, see Digipay’s Tehran Index profile.

Cite as: Tehran Index, “Iran’s BNPL Market, in Global Context,” Iran in Context No. 04, 26 July 2026. Iran anchors from the Tehran Index registry, first published in “The 2% Problem in Iran’s $29B Lending Market” (3 July 2026), and from Digipay’s Codal filing (reported by Digiato). Comparators: Klarna Group plc FY2025 results (public filings), Tabby and Tamara 2025 company-reported figures, Saudi Arabia BNPL market-size estimates (Mordor Intelligence and other market-research firms, flagged as a wide range). FX at the Tehran Index FX Desk rate stated in the text.