Splitit Pledges ‘2-Second’ BNPL Checkout With SplititExpress

Buy now, pay later provider Splitit has unveiled what it calls a “super-fast” payment experience.

Introduced Tuesday (April 25), SplititExpress lets buy now, pay later (BNPL) customers check out in under two seconds while supporting payments via Apple Pay and Google Pay.

“By using cutting-edge technologies, our engineering team has not only improved the speed and performance of our solution, they have delivered the most seamless card-attached installment experience in the market,” Ran Landau, the company’s CTO, said in a news release.

“Reducing technical uplift for our merchants is always top of mind at Splitit, that’s why SplititExpress can be embedded into their checkouts by simply adding a few lines of code.”

The result, Landau added, is a process that takes less than two seconds end to end for a customer to checkout, compared to one to two minutes on average for “even the fastest legacy BNPL’s offer.”

Recent research by PYMNTS has found that merchants can tap into huge potential revenue gains if they offer BNPL to their customers in-store as well as online.

For example, 45% of in-store department store shoppers have a favorable view of merchants who offer BNPL, according to “Ensuring BNPL Satisfaction Across Sales Channels,” the January edition of the “Buy Now, Pay Later Tracker®,” a PYMNTS and Splitit collaboration.

The report also showed that two-thirds of millennial consumers view luxury and specialty retailers favorably when those merchants provide a BNPL option.

Meanwhile, PYMNTS spoke with Omri Flicker, chief legal and risk officer at Splitit, about why his industry needs to have regulatory oversight.

BNPL has long been thought of as a useful gateway for people who historically had been underserved by traditional sources of credit, allowing them to avoid riskier options such as overdraft facilities, payday loans and pawn loans.

“[BNPL was considered many as consumers’] first taste of credit in order to build credit histories,” said Flicker. “But the numbers tell us that this is not necessarily true.”

To be fair, BNPL has not exactly been risk-free. Although its interest rates are still well below the 20% often charged by traditional cards, some BNPL providers can make installment loans prohibitively costly by adding fees. With a rising segment of BNPL users choosing this option for everyday expenses, these fees can quickly stack up.

“[There can be high] interest rates associated with BNPL in the event of missed payments, Flicker said. “There’s [also] an overall lack of standardized disclosures — pre-purchase and post-purchase — and no uniform reporting to credit bureaus.”