Sezzle Awarded ‘Top FinTech’ Recognition by CNBC

Payments platform Sezzle has been named one of CNBC’s top FinTechs.

The award for the World’s Top Fintech Companies 2023, announced Wednesday (Aug. 2), places Sezzle among those companies “building innovative, tech-enabled and finance-related products and services,” as CNBC put it on its website.

According to a news release, the award follows a year in which Sezzle managed to change its fortunes, becoming one of the buy now, pay later (BNPL) industry’s profitable players.

“We spent the past year building and creating an entire suite of new product features intended to bring our shoppers closer to financial freedom,” said Sezzle CEO Charlie Youakim.

The award, he added, “supports our momentum to become the leading digital payment solution. We are committed to advocating for the credit marginalized, and building products that bridge the gap between traditional banking and those who need responsible credit most.”

Youakim is a frequent PYMNTS interview subject, including a conversation last month in which he predicted that banks would increase their acquisitions of FinTech firms.

“Banks are not great at digital, though they’re getting better at it,” he said. And in some cases, when it comes to creating cutting edge digital offerings, “they don’t have the chops or the ability and talent, internally, to launch a new product or get it to scale.”

Youakim emphasized that not all banks will try to buy up their smaller FinTech partners. Some are focused on “professionalizing” partnerships, he said, but don’t act as acquirers. In fact, some banks, including Web Bank and Cross River Bank, specialize in “growing” FinTechs to the point where another bank would be interested in purchasing them.

“If you’re in the innovation space as a FinTech, and you can prove profitability and prove growth, you’re likely to prove to be an attractive acquisition target for a bank,” Youakim said.

Sezzle also collaborated with PYMNTS on the recent report “The Credit Economy: How Younger Consumers Make Credit Decisions.”

That study found that the short-term, interest-free monthly payments offered by BNPL plans are used more by millennials than other generations, with more than 20% of the surveyed age group, whose members were born between 1981 and 1996, had used the credit product in the 90 days before the survey.

“This represents a more than one-third higher use share than other generations and contributes to millennials’ relatively high credit usage rate overall,” PYMNTS wrote Wednesday. “Millennials’ respective 12% and 22% rates of home equity and personal loans join BNPL plan use in being utilized most by the generation to represent the highest share of these products used across age demographics.”