Simpl’s BNPL Success Story – Where Trust Meets Tech
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Globally, the Buy-Now-Pay-Later industry is traversing a steep growth trajectory. A study by Kaleido Intelligence estimates that the BNPL market would grow from $89Bn in 2020 to $ 352Bn by 2025, a growth rate of almost 400%.
Additionally, it is expected that in 2025, $731 Bn would be spent globally by utilizing the digital point of sale finance options, largely attributable to the surge in BNPL usage.
The secret sauce to BNPL’s success: Effectively managing credit risks
Being an unsecured credit product, the key to BNPL’s success story lies in its ability to control credit risk by leveraging upon data intelligence and cutting-edge technology tools to derive deep insights for prudent credit decision-making. The technology stack at Simpl is robust and advanced. Our core systems are built on polyglot microservices, primarily Ruby, GoLang, and Python. We capitalise on AWS and multi-AZ capabilities, with an eclectic mix of open source and homegrown tools for DevOPS to ensure high availability.
Our underwriting strategy: Simpl yet powerful
We harness ML capabilities for our complete credit decisions. This has dual advantages of eliminating human bias with an accurate assessment of the creditworthiness of the end-customers.
When a user attempts to check out using Simpl, we need to make two key decisions – firstly, whether we should allow the user to transact and secondly, how much credit limit should we allocate to this user.
We achieve this by stimulating and process 100+ features including the behavior of the user on the merchant platforms, the behavior of similar users with an analysis of historical patterns, signals from app installations, and run them through an ensemble model which is a combination of decision trees, gradient boosting, Bernoulli Naïve Bayes classifiers and simple logistic regression. To prevent fraud transactions, we utilize repurposed time series prediction models, along with our value-added functionalities to identify suspicious transactions and exceptions.
Data is indeed the new oil
Simpl’s core strength is its continuous data processing. We get millions of signals about users every day, which are processed, stored, and interpreted to enable credit decision-making at scale. Our systems function around event sourcing using Kafka, whereby multiple user touch points provide data points into our event store, which are then systematically parsed by various subsystems to glean the necessary data points asynchronously.
Small is the new Big
Simpl focuses on small ticket size transactions that consumers do frequently. Our approach is to deliver a superior user experience that surpasses all other current payment options, both from a consumer and merchant perspective, towards achieving huge engagement levels.
Merchant recommendations as to the starting point
We enjoy deep integration with merchants, who approach us to provide BNPL as a payment option to their loyal and best customers. At the root of Simpl’s product philosophy is the trust existing between merchants and customers with the goal of strengthening their mutual relationship.
Trust meets digital payments
Simpl’s ecosystem based on the bedrock of trust, along with our tech-driven data analytics functions as an efficient mechanism towards controlling credit risks.
