Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) is a type of short-term financing that allows customers buy a product and pay for it at a later date in monthly installments. It’s usually a faster and easier way to buy items on credit without having to wait on an actual loan.
To approve use of this service, providers of Buy Now, Pay Later products have to assess the customer’s ability to pay back in full and on time. This includes knowing the user’s income level, weighing that information against the criteria to get the particular item on credit and then automatically approving or rejecting the customer’s application.
Usually, all or some of these processes are tied together with code and then rendered on a mobile app or website that the user gets to interact with. For our build, we’ll be using none of this.
We’re building a BNPL product for an imaginary company called Furnish - yes you guessed it, a furniture company. Furnish sells beautiful furniture pieces to millennials and they’ve decided they want their customers to be able to buy their favorite pieces and pay for it later in installments.
For this to work, Furnish has to access bank statements of their customers and approve orders of those whose average monthly income matches the criteria that has been set - which is an average of at least 20,000 Naira. To make things easy, we’ll ditch website and mobile app builders and settle for a simple form for the user interface.
The tools we are going to be using are:
A customer makes an order through a form, submits their bank statement through Mono and then receives an email notification letting them know if their order was approved or rejected.