You don’t find many people (read millennials) planning to buy a house or a car early in their careers, mostly because of their flashy lifestyle, which ends up emptying their pockets before they even get their next paycheck.
But you might find it hard to believe that startups, like Lazy Pay and EPaylater, have come up with apps that let you buy literally anything (even food), and you can pay for it, well, later.
Targeting a mobile-savvy generation is always challenging, but the buy now-pay later model might be a new trend in India, and experts have seen this space growing at a rapid pace.
So, are these platforms working their way into our lives simply because we can’t pay for our lavish Zomato/Swiggy meals everyday? To which Pallav Jain, Head of Consumer Business, PayU India highlights the convenience of using such methods.
With over 2,50,000 users on its platform, LazyPay claims to clock 10,000-11,000 transactions per day, and till date, it is said to have clocked over 800K transactions. Over 70 percent of their users are on Android (rest on iOS), while 80 percent of their transactions are processed through mobile (20 percent on web).
Lazy Pay is a product extension of Pay U, mainly a payment gateway which has conceived this product, and they aren’t alone in this business. EPaylater made the headlines in 2017 for joining hands with IRCTC allowing railway tickets buyers to pay later for their travels.
Meanwhile, established online shopping brands like Flipkart and Amazon are also not far away from doing something similar for big-ticket items. But what fascinated me about Lazy Pay and its model is their clarity on keeping it simple and small.
We all get food from Swiggy and Zomato by paying for orders every single time, which may not be to everyone’s liking. And in Lazy Pay’s case, they have identified 2,50,000 such people who’d rather accumulate their bill costs and pay in 15 days time.
While there aren’t market reports to make a forecast for this model, but if the biggies have an interest in it, rest assured, the market will open up further.
This whole pay later business takes you back to the old-school philosophy of ‘udhaar’ or credit, which isn’t new in our culture. But if there’s anything we have learnt about this model is that people never shy away from asking, but paying on time never works as it should.
Which is why, I was curious to know how Pallav and Co ensure that people who subscribe to his product, pay back for sure.
All this technology in tow results in their model with a 98 percent of payment conversion rate, which according to Pallav, is under control with their access to data. But even then, defaulting users are given another three days to make the payment, which includes daily penalty of Rs 10.
But this impressive control on who gets to ‘pay later’ brings out the much debated ‘user privacy’ factor, which he says is monitored by machines, and with consent from the user.
Summing up our conversation, he was quick to mention that Lazy Pay has prior agreement in terms of security with merchants when no transactions are taking place, safeguarding their business interest this way.
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