When Bahaa Daouk moved back to Lebanon, he started noticing something at the checkout counter. Shoppers were putting items back on the shelf. Not because they did not want them, but because there was no way to spread the cost. The full price up front was the only option, and for many people that option had disappeared.
Daouk had spent years abroad watching a different system work. He is the founder of Slideit, a Beirut fintech that lets people buy now and pay in installments. He built it to put back something Lebanon's financial collapse had taken away.
Splitting the Bill at Checkout
Slideit is a buy now, pay later service. A shopper picks what they want, splits the payment into installments through the app, and takes the product home the same day. The merchant is paid, and the customer pays over time.
Daouk saw the model from both sides while living abroad. As a shopper, splitting a large purchase into installments felt simple, with no debt trap and no hidden fees. As a merchant, he watched the same option lift sales, raise the size of each basket, and bring customers back.
A Market That Lost Its Credit
Lebanon's financial crisis did more than freeze bank accounts. It wiped out credit cards, consumer lending, and the installment plans shoppers once took for granted. The tools that let people manage a big purchase were simply gone.
That left both sides stuck. Customers walked away from things they genuinely needed. Merchants watched sales leave the store because few people could pay the full amount at once. Slideit is Daouk's answer to that gap.
"I saw BNPL change how people shop and how merchants sell," Daouk said. "When I came back to Lebanon, I couldn't accept that the country that needed it most didn't have it. So I built it."
Building a Credit Score From Scratch
Approving a shopper for installments usually depends on a credit bureau. Lebanon does not have one that functions. So Slideit built its own underwriting system, called Credit Brain, an AI and machine learning engine designed to score customers in a market with no shared credit history.
Daouk describes Credit Brain as infrastructure rather than a feature. It is the piece that decides who can borrow and how much, and it was built from the ground up for local conditions.
3,500 Users and No Ad Budget
Slideit has signed up 3,500 app users and is still growing, and it has done so without spending on paid acquisition. Every user found the app on their own, which Daouk points to as proof that the demand was there all along.
On the merchant side, the app is already live with retailers including Khoury Home, PacMax, Intertravel, BOSS, DFY, and House of Excellence. These are the stores where a shopper can choose Slideit at the counter today.
Fitting Into the Checkout Merchants Already Use
The next step is making Slideit invisible at the register. The company is working on integrations with Monty Pay and Areeba, two of the largest payment processors in Lebanon.
Once those go live, merchants will not need a separate terminal or a new workflow. They will be able to switch on installment payments inside the point-of-sale systems they already run every day, offering Slideit as part of the normal checkout.
For a company founded in 2025, that is a fast start in a market that had written off installment buying entirely. Slideit is betting that Lebanese shoppers and the stores that serve them were only ever missing the tool, not the appetite.
See how Slideit works for shoppers and merchants in Lebanon.
