Micro loans are Asia’s hottest fintech products as Gen Z and millennial online shoppers prefer to buy now, pay later

Buy now, pay later (BNPL) services may double their share of Asia’s e-commerce payments market from 0.6 per cent to 1.3 per cent, according to forecasts

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Published: 7:30am, 4 Dec 2021Updated: 4:35pm, 6 Dec 2021

For Marcus Khoo, perfumes and oil diffusers were never high on his shopping list. They would have sat idling in his online shopping cart, were it not for a hire-purchase instalment payment option that tipped the balance in his decision.

Using a service called Rely, Khoo divided his S$56 (US$41) shopping bill into four fortnightly instalments, free of interest. The Singapore-based start-up, founded in 2016, plugs into dozens of stores that sell fashion, accessories and electronics, including the shoe brand Geox and the clothing brand Charles & Keith.

“I like it because you pay less for the item at the start and there is no interest, unlike a credit card,” said Khoo, a 26-year-old social media executive who has used the option three times this year. “You still pay the full price, except it is split across different time periods. The pain of your money departing from your wallet is delayed, compared to paying it off in one shot.”

Rely is one of dozens of hire-purchase credit providers – known by their Gen Z acronyms BNPL for “buy now, pay later” – that are sprouting up all over Asia, poised to double their share of the region’s e-commerce payments market from 0.6 per cent to 1.3 per cent, according to a forecast by the FIS-Worldpay Global Payments Report 2021.