Dubai-Based Toggle Market Expands BNPL for Hospitality Industry

Dubai tech company Toggle Market is debuting a financing program that will offer a buy now, pay later (BNPL) function for hotels and restaurants, a company press release said.

“BNPL for business is vastly different to B2C BNPL,” said Fuad Sajdi, CEO of Toggle Market, “Through our SaaS enabled marketplace www.togglehospitality.com we have been able to drive offline purchases online. We have created a platform that gives total control for the HORECA [hotel-restaurant-cafe] industry to dictate what payment terms they want to have, helping them spread payments over 6-12 months, whilst guaranteeing their suppliers are still paid within 24 hours. We now enable businesses that want to scale regardless of the market conditions and help them better their own customer service.”

The program had been piloted previously with a limited number of hotels and food-and-beverage groups in the Middle East and Europe. Now it will be fully available for every hospitality business in those regions. It will also see an expansion to Africa, initially for North and East Africa.

The report notes that the company was founded in 2020 to help connect supply chains of nonstandard goods.

BNPL has been surging in popularity — in another recent example, Indonesian digital banking and finance platform Akulaku will be expanding its own BNPL platform.

See also: Indonesia’s Akulaku Expands BNPL Offering

The company’s PayLater, launched earlier in 2022, allows people without much credit history to purchase products they need, and to pay for them in scheduled increments.

The company wants to offer these services to 10,000 online merchants and over 100,000 offline stores in the next few years.

Akulaku CFO Fan Zhang said the company is “committed to innovation through enhancing our core tech and risk capabilities, as well as by developing additional technological and financial products and services.”

“Indonesia’s BNPL sector has a strong future,” he said. “As countries in Southeast Asia continue to recover [from] post-COVID-19 lockdowns, the overall credit market will continue to grow at an expedited rate.”