Tamara Sees 32% Surge in Credit Approvals with Lean’s Open Banking
Saudi Arabia’s leading buy now, pay later (BNPL) platform, Tamara, has taken a bold step forward in financial inclusion by partnering with Lean Technologies, and the numbers are hard to ignore. The collaboration has driven a 32% overall increase in credit approvals, fundamentally changing who gets access to credit in the Kingdom.
The results come from a newly published case study detailing the multi-year partnership. At its core, the deal uses Lean Technologies’ open banking infrastructure to give Tamara real-time visibility into a customer’s actual income and cash flow, the kind of picture that traditional credit scoring models have long failed to capture accurately.
That gap in legacy systems has historically shut out an enormous segment of the population: freelancers, gig economy workers, and anyone without a conventional employment record. These are not high-risk customers by nature, they simply don’t fit the old templates. By plugging into open banking data, Tamara’s credit decisions are now grounded in what people actually earn and spend, not just what a bureau report says about them.
The impact on non-salaried customers has been particularly striking. Tamara open banking credit approvals for this group surged by 60%, a figure that signals just how underserved this segment had been under conventional models. That’s not a marginal gain, it represents a structural shift in how a major BNPL provider in the Gulf evaluates financial risk.
For Lean Technologies, this partnership reinforces what the firm has been building toward across the region. The company is regulated in the UAE by the ADGM Financial Services Regulatory Authority to provide Third Party Services, and operates under the Saudi Central Bank’s Regulatory Sandbox to test its services locally, a sign that regulators in the region are increasingly open to alternative data frameworks in lending.
The broader significance here extends well beyond Tamara’s growth metrics. As alternative financial data becomes more accessible and reliable across the Middle East, the grip that traditional credit models have held over who qualifies for financial products is beginning to loosen. Open banking is no longer a talking point, it’s actively moving the needle on credit inclusion, one approval at a time.
