Buy Now Pay Later: market overview and outlook

Lorenzo Gobbi ()
Additional contact information
Lorenzo Gobbi: Banca d'Italia

No 730, Questioni di Economia e Finanza (Occasional Papers) from Bank of Italy, Economic Research and International Relations Area

Abstract: The surge of digitization in the financial industry and in e-commerce has favoured the strong growth of Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) operators, which traditionally grant short-term loans of a limited amount, allowing consumers to split the payment of a purchase into a variable number of interest-free instalments. After providing a general overview of the BNPL model and some statistics on market penetration, this paper describes the existing regulatory framework, in terms of both contracts and licences. It then considers the potential implications of rising inflation, and of the resulting increases in interest rates by various Central Banks, for the business models of BNPL operators, whose valuations have already decreased. Lastly, it discusses the need to protect consumers from inadvertently piling up excessive debt.

Keywords: Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL); Fintech; Digital credit (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: G23 G51 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ban, nep-mon and nep-pay
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.bancaditalia.it/pubblicazioni/qef/2022-0730/QEF_730_22.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bdi:opques:qef_730_22

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Questioni di Economia e Finanza (Occasional Papers) from Bank of Italy, Economic Research and International Relations Area Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().