PayPal Acquires Japan's Paidy for $2.7B To Crack the Buy-Now, Pay-Later Market in Asia (techcrunch.com) 3
PayPal, the U.S. fintech company, announced an acquisition of Paidy, a Japanese buy now, pay later (BNPL) service platform, for approximately $2.7 billion (300 billion yen), mostly in cash, to enhance its business in Japan. From a report: The transaction completion including the regulatory approval is expected in the fourth quarter of 2021. After the acquisition, the Japan-based company will continue to operate its existing business and maintain the brand while the leaders, Paidy's president and CEO Riku Sugie and founder and executive chairman of Paidy Russel Cummer, keep their positions. Japan is the third largest e-commerce market in the world, and so this is a significant move by PayPal to gain more market share both in the country and the region, specifically in the area of providing deferred payment services as an alternative to credit cards.
What is Paidy? (Score:4, Informative)
Paidy is basically a two-sided payments service, acting as a middleman between consumers and merchants in Japan. Using machine learning it determines the creditworthiness of a consumer related to a particular purchase, and then it underwrites those transactions in seconds, guaranteeing payments to merchants. Consumers then make deferred payment to Paidy for those goods.
From the article.
"Buy now, pay later" ... AKA "the debt trap". (Score:1)
Avoid like the plague.