Danish buy now, pay later (BNPL) firm ViaBill has raised $120 million in a debt and equity round led by the U.K.’s Fasanara Capital.
“We see huge demand for Buy Now Pay Later that isn’t limited to online stores,” Jan Lytje-Hansen, CEO and co-founder of ViaBill, said in a news release Tuesday (Feb. 15).
“So together with our partner MasterCard we have developed a solution that can be used anywhere, online or in-store. We have rolled out this new BNPL product in Denmark, Spain and the USA. Thanks to Fasanara Capital’s support, we can accelerate expansion,” he said.
Lytje-Hansen added that as major BNPL players like Affirm, AfterPay and Klarna have “infiltrated” online payments, there’s a lack of BNPL solutions for brick and mortar stores.
“We solved this. Consumers around the world can download the ViaBill App, enter a limited set of data, and have ViaBill’s advanced credit decision engine immediately evaluate their creditworthiness,” he said. “If successful, a virtual credit card is issued on the spot which the consumer can push to their wallet and use to pay as usual.”
ViaBill said it has tested the shopping behaviors of about 11,000 consumers in the past few months, finding a major uptick in BNPL transactions.
“It’ll be interesting to see if offline BNPL will disrupt the payment mechanisms as rapidly as we’ve seen in the online space,” Lytje-Hansen said.
Read more: No Slowdown in Sight for Surging BNPL as Consumers Want it, Retailers Need It
PYMNTS research has shown the rising popularity of this payment method. In our December Buy Now, Pay Later Tracker, we found that BNPL made up 3% of all purchases for 2021. While that’s less than a tenth of debit and credit card use, BNPL’s growth rate nearly doubled, making it far and away the fastest-growing payment method consumers are considering.
“We see BNPL as a gamechanger in the payments space,” Fasanara Capital CEO and co-founder, Francesco Filia said. “Consumers of today want convenience and flexibility when they shop online and offline, and at Fasanara Capital we want to support leaders in this space.”