The buy now, pay later sector’s rising bad debts and losses have become more apparent after pandemic stimulus payments from the government ended last year, and investors are worried.
Both Latitude and Humm are incarnations of conventional finance businesses. Latitude was GE Money, which still arranges Harvey Norman’s consumer finance deals. Humm emerged out of Flexigroup.
Abercrombie says that, until a couple of years ago, Humm would not do a BNPL service for under $500 because they believed it would attract people who would be poor credit risks. In a recent column, Scott Galloway, Professor of Marketing at NYU Stern School of Business and BNPL critic, points to US consumer debt jumping to record highs with BNPL playing a dominant role, but at the expense of soaring losses as bad debts and marketing expenses boomed.
“The industry as a whole, which has seen bad debts spike, really missed that moment. And we are now going to have to dig our way out of that,” she says. Everyone now recognises that it makes no difference, which means the operators’ thinking has only just caught up with long-time critics like payments veteran Grant Halverson, who heads consultancy McLean Roche.
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