PYMNTS Intelligence’s latest research finds that the U.S. market for buy now, pay later (BNPL) credit totals $175 billion. While that’s a small slice of total consumer spending, it represents an 88-fold spike in BNPL in just six years.
Growing consumer demand for fixed installment plans when they make a purchase is fueling hot competition among FinTechs and traditional banks, not just for consumer wallets but also for ties with merchants. The pay later ecosystem is rapidly evolving to change how Americans shop and merchants sell goods and services.
In “Pay Later Revolution: Redefining the Credit Economy,” a PYMNTS Intelligence special report, we survey the evolution of credit and unpack the business and revenue models driving the highly competitive and rapidly evolving consumer credit landscape. One key insight: Higher-income consumers increasingly use BNPL not out of necessity but out of the convenience it affords in managing personal cash flows.
Download the report to learn more about the Pay Later industry.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) said Friday (April 11) that it will not prioritize enforcement of a regulation requiring a registry of nonbank financial companies that have broken consumer laws and are subject to federal, state or local government or court orders.
“The Bureau will instead continue to focus its enforcement and supervision activities on pressing threats to consumers,” the CFPB said in a Friday press release. “The Bureau is further considering issuing a notice of proposed rulemaking to rescind the regulation or narrow its scope.”
The regulation, “Registry of Nonbank Covered Persons Subject to Certain Agency and Court Orders,” was announced by the CFPB in June.
The Bureau said at the time in a press release that the regulation required covered nonbank companies to register with the CFPB when they have been caught violating consumer law and to provide an attestation from a senior executive that the company follows any relevant orders.
It added that the registry is meant to help law enforcement across the United States identify and stop repeat offenders.
“Too many American families have been harmed by corporate repeat offenders in a rinse-and-repeat cycle of illegality, where bad actors see fines and penalties as the cost of doing business,” then-CFPB Director Rohit Chopra said at the time. “Throughout our economy, we have seen fraudsters and scam artists get caught in one part of the country and restart their scheme in a new place hoping to not get caught again.”
Regulators did not offer up cost-benefit analyses as to how the expanded disclosures would impact and improve earlier procedures — and what the impact might be, ultimately, to firms and their end customers — PYMNTS reported at the time.
Commenting on the registry when it was proposed, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce said in a March 2023 letter to the CFPB that “in publicizing information that is already public, the Proposed Rule would not help consumers. In contrast, the Proposed Rule would impose very real costs upon consumer financial services companies that are subject to its requirements, including by driving up compliance costs through an unlawful executive attestation requirement … specifically, the contemplated public disclosures will lack critical context, particularly when a final order does not disclose potential weaknesses in the agency’s case, the reasons the company chose to enter a settlement agreement and whether the company admitted fault.”
The CFPB said in its Friday press release that it aims to give “regulatory relief” from the registration requirements for small loan providers.
