Afterpay-led buy now, pay later sector booms as more money pours in

The buoyancy of the listed buy now, pay later stocks is filtering into the private market, with Afterpay competitor Payright securing $12 million in a funding round led by wealth managers Escala Partners.

It is the second local private BNPL fintech to raise funding in as many months, with white label BNPL business Limepay raising $6 million, showing that appetite for investing in split payments businesses stretches beyond the ASX.

Payright, which has now raised $60 million in the last 18 months, specialises in higher value transactions than the leaders in the space, Afterpay and Zip, offering consumers the ability to pay via instalments on transactions up to $10,000. In one-off circumstances this limit can be extended to $20,000.

Speaking to The Australian Financial Review, co-founder and co-CEO Myles Redward said the average value per transaction using Payright was $2500.

“There’s been a number of new entrants to the market in the last six to 12 months, but most focus on transactions that are a few hundred dollars. That’s our key difference,” he said.

“We are approaching 50,000 customers on the books at the moment and we have 3000 merchants. The March quarter saw a record high number of merchants join … up about 200 per cent.”

Mr Redward and his brother, Piers, who both came from a finance background, founded the business in 2016.

Rather than clothing retail merchants, its sweet spot is in the home improvement and health and wellness industries. Merchants using the platform include AMA Group.

According to a recent Roy Morgan report, awareness of BNPL services Afterpay and Zip have soared 22.1 percentage points in the last 18 months, with more than 12.3 million Australians aware of their services.

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Source: Afterpay-led buy now, pay later sector booms as more money pours in