Abdulaziz Fahad Al-Jouf, founder and CEO of payment processing company PayTabs

Abdulaziz Fahad Al-Jouf, founder and CEO of payment processing company PayTabs

RIYADH: Abdulaziz Fahad Al-Jouf is the founder and CEO of PayTabs, a payment processing company founded in Saudi Arabia in January 2014 and now based in Bahrain. He graduated from Riyadh’s Imam Muhammad Ibn Saud Islamic University in 1999 with a bachelor’s degree in Islamic business and subsequently obtained a bachelor’s degree in information technology from the University of Nebraska-Omaha and a master’s degree in e-business from the New York Institute of Technology. PayTabs was founded in 2013 after Al-Jouf “faced problems finding a suitable payments gateway for one of his business startups ... and figured there would be many others with the same issues.” The company, in its own words, “processes payments securely and efficiently ... catering to small, medium and large enterprises and prides itself on offering simple invoicing services for merchants and professionals.” PayTabs was, according to Al-Jouf, “taken under the wing” of Saudi Aramco’s entrepreneurship scheme “Wa’ed” and made headlines in August 2017 when it raised $20 million investment from unnamed sources. These funds supported the expansion of PayTabs across the Middle East and into other countries in Asia. In 2018 PayTabs was recognized by Forbes Middle East as No. 1 among “the top 20 Fintech