India’s buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) industry is booming and set to surge over ten-fold within four years as tens of millions of online shoppers get lured by interest-free credit with fewer hassles, market players told Reuters.
Redseer estimates India’s BNPL market will rocket to $45-50 billion by 2026 from $3-3.5 billion now. The research firm also estimates that the number of BNPL users in the country may rise to 80-100 million customers by then, from 10-15 million currently.
However, since the maximum credit currently being offered on BNPL is 100,000 rupees ($1,347.89), much lower than credit card offers, it will take some time before it can disrupt the cards market or wrest market share, said analysts at Macquarie Research.
Fintech firm MobiKwik sees BNPL business nearly doubling for the company in two years, in a country where hundreds of millions of people have little access to formal credit.
MobiKwik, which is among the top BNPL players in India and is backed by the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, said income from the segment accounted for nearly a fifth of its 3.02 billion rupees revenue for the financial year ending March 31.
“Only 60-70 million Indians have access to credit today, which means 93% of India has no access to credit,” said Upasana Taku, co-founder of the firm.
“It will become the fastest revenue driver for the business because there has been a 45X growth in the BNPL transactions in the last two years. New user addition is very high; repeat rate and average ticket size is going up.”
As the Covid-19 pandemic sent more and more people towards online shopping, the demand for easy loans has driven more players to enter the BNPL market – Amazon joined the BNPL bandwagon in 2020 while homegrown payments firm BharatPe started the service last month.
