India's buy-now-pay-later market to touch $40 bn by 2025

The buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) market in India's fintech space is set to touch a staggering $40 billion by 2025, a new report showed on Thursday.

This fintech subsegment, which saw 9 times funding growth and massive adoption in 2021, is moving at a 65 per cent (on-year) growth, according to management consulting firm Redseer.

Several startups and fintech platforms have joined the BNPL bandwagon like Simpl, Lazypay, Zestmoney, ePayLater, Flipkart, Paytm, PhonePe and Amazon India who offer various BNPL products.

"The majority of consumers use BNPL frequently, have good usage hygiene, and usually pay on time. However, there are some consumer experience areas to be solved to drive higher average revenue per user (ARPU)/customer lifetime value (LTV) from the existing user base," said Mrigank Gutgutia, Associate Partner, Redseer.

Increased credit limit, cash withdrawals, improved user convenience, and more merchant tie-ups are a few key areas that need improvement.

"Regulations will also be key as several nations have started to regulate BNPL to protect users and reduce defaults, while India is still in the nascent stage," Gutgutia noted.

India's BNPL ecosystem is now seeing multiple products and business models emerge, primarily as a result of the country's diverse BNPL users and ecosystems.

BNPL players are driving very high customer satisfaction and are significantly ahead of traditional pay later products as well, the report highlighted.

Current BNPL use cases are skewed towards e-commerce, and consumers primarily use this option for online shopping, food delivery, bill payments, online travel, eHealth, EdTech, and ride hailing.

"Close to 73 per cent of this segment use BNPL for online shopping. Companies are actively trying to diversify their use cases with wider merchant partnerships," said the report.