the ENTERTAINER, the Dubai based lifestyle membership and rewards company, has appointed Abdulla Almoayed as Chairman, part of a wider set of senior leadership appointments announced on 28 September 2026 as the 25 year old business attempts to convert brand recognition into a data led consumer platform. Almoayed will work with the board and shareholders to guide what the company describes as its next phase, with priorities in product, technology, data and customer experience.
The announcement paired the board level change with three executive hires and named continuing members of the management team. Louay Akkad joins as vice president of engineering, having been a senior engineering leader at Fresha. Waseem Akram Syed becomes director of data and analytics, arriving from Kitopi. Amira Eldin joins as vice president of people, having built people functions at companies including Tamara. Yamen Fakhreddine continues as chief financial officer, and the release also named Dariush Kamyab, director of marketing, and Keith Jaggard, who holds a commercial leadership role. "the ENTERTAINER is one of the region's most recognised lifestyle brands, built over twenty-five years on the trust of our members and merchant partners," Almoayed said. "The opportunity is now simple to say and hard to do: turn a brand people know into a product they can't live without." No search firm was named in the announcement.
The announcement set out little of Almoayed's own record, saying only that he brings experience across financial services and technology in the region. It did not name his previous employers, list other board seats, give an educational background or state whether he holds an equity interest in the company, and the press release distributed through regional wires carried the same single line. The role itself was described in terms of working with the board and shareholders on strategic direction rather than on day to day management, which is consistent with a non executive chairmanship, although the company did not use that term.
the ENTERTAINER was founded in Dubai in 2001 by Donna Benton, initially publishing buy one get one free voucher books covering restaurants, spas, hotels and leisure attractions, before launching a mobile application in 2013 and rebuilding the business around subscriptions and data. The company says it now has more than 370,000 active app users across the Gulf Cooperation Council and works with thousands of merchant partners, and it also runs a loyalty services arm for corporate clients in banking, telecommunications, retail and government. In 2018 GFH Financial Group BSC led the purchase of about 85 per cent of the company, with Al Futtaim Group and Al Zarooni Emirates Investments taking minority stakes alongside it and Benton retaining a holding.
The shape of the announcement is itself informative. Three of the four new appointments sit in engineering, data and people, which suggests the shareholders have concluded that the constraint on the business is execution capacity rather than brand awareness, an inference supported by Almoayed's own framing of the task as turning a known brand into an indispensable product. Naming a chairman whose stated background is in financial services and technology, rather than retail or media, is consistent with a platform and monetisation agenda, though the company gave no detail on what that means commercially. No revenue, subscriber growth or profitability figures accompanied the announcement, and the company said only that further product roadmap detail would follow in the coming months, so the plan cannot yet be tested against numbers.
