Image by Mediamodifier from Pixabay
There’s no stopping it—the massive growth of BNPL services has gotten the attention of everyone from consumers and FinTech market watchers to big tech companies like PayPal and Apple. Currently, this momentum is expected to continue with the global BNPL market share expected to hit USD 39.41 billion by 2030 and a 26% compound annual growth rate from 2022 to 2030.
As one of the world’s leading alternative payments, buy now, pay later (BNPL) gives shoppers the option to purchase a product immediately and commit to paying for it later in weekly or monthly installments. Today, BNPL companies have grown to include point-of-sale (POS), e-commerce and even “super app” capabilities.
One thing is for sure: the BNPL business model works well for traditional finance players and FinTechs alike. With more and more shoppers using BNPL instead of credit cards, it’s time for your business to get up to speed with what the future holds for custom BNPL development.
Ways to harness BNPL’s benefits for businesses
Executing a successful BNPL product starts with a universal tech-forward approach. The FinTech experts at Star recommend traditional finance and startups focus on these three aspects:
- Select your best go-to-market strategy. Most importantly, any player in this ecosystem needs to look at the available options based on organizational strengths and up-to-date market positioning. These should include the four main options: purchase, partner, connect and create.
a. Purchase can take the form of acquiring a BNPL company – like Square’s acquisition of Afterpay – or purchasing a license of a current POS platform and going into white-label BNPL app development.
b. Partner means joining forces with an established BNPL firm as a more guaranteed way to optimize sector-wide and digital expertise plus drive user adoption.
c. Connect refers to finding an existing marketplace platform that funnels users through a single checkout experience but provides them with multiple payment and lender options. This model allows new players an easier, more cost-effective entrance into the alternative payments market.
d. Create is always on the table with end-to-end custom BNPL development that takes on other providers directly. This model is better suited for businesses that have more mature digital expertise—with banks, financial institutions, and credit card companies able to build these solutions around their existing platforms and customer base.
Regardless of your company’s size or maturity, all these options should be explored before making a final decision.
2. Create a holistic customer journey. One of the biggest reasons why buy now, pay later has been wildly successful is due to the consumer-centric nature of these services and digital payments overall. End-users make the rules here, not providers—and features like flexibility and lower rates than credit cards plus seamless omnichannel experiences are huge drivers. There’s much more to discover about these current BNPL trends behind consumer adoption and how to innovate within this space.
3. Empower a localized, robust partner ecosystem. The key here is scalability, which means finding the right partners from the very beginning. Each market has different opportunities, and Paidy’s BNPL app development in Japan provides a great example. The finance market on this island nation is famously difficult to enter because people in Japan don’t use credit cards as frequently as in other cultures – instead, they typically use cash and pay in person at convenience stores. Paidy found its niche by partnering with these convenience stores with frictionless services that users quickly learned to trust. This BNPL service’s success stems from adapting to this local system, and any company should do specific market research on available partnership networks before developing their BNPL product.
BNPL innovation in any context
Whether a traditional player or FinTech startup, financial services technology consulting offers a much needed end-to-end development strategy. Star experts, in particular, specialize in co-creating and building cutting-edge FinTech ventures with 40 percent faster delivery to get your product to market.
