Buy Now Pay Later is a phenomenon shaking up retail. And one of the giants of the space is ONEY.
With 2,600 employees serving 12 countries, ONEY is a global name going head-to-head with the likes of Klarna and Clearpay. It serves more than 650 partners such as Bose, Dyson, La Redoute, and Decathlon.
So how it ONEY doing it? Jean Michel Goncalves, CEO of ONEY Romania, spoke to Andrei Gaman on FintechOS to reveal his company’s secrets.
Goncalves emphasised the explosive growth of the sector: “Buy Now Pay Later is already a euro 60 billion market in Europe, which is amazing. Right now it represents 8 per cent of the total ecommerce sales, and in 2023 we are planning for this to reach 10 per cent. In some mature countries like Germany it’s around 20 per cent or more. This is unbelievable. And the market is growing at 20 to 30 per cent a year.”
“It’s really disrupting consumer finance right now”.
But how is ONEY thriving in this brutal market?
“The customer journey is key,” said Goncalves. “It’s very simple. Three steps:
“In Romania there are close to 3 million credit cards and 17 million debit cards. We are offering instalment payment for all the debit cards issued in Romania, which is 6 times more than the usual credit cards that allow payment in installments. So, we are targeting a bigger market which is a big plus for the merchants.”
The simplicity means ONEY has a sky high completion rate. It’s fool proof.
The acceptance rate is high too, owing to technology behind the scenes. ONEY also runs a credit risk analytics service, and this means an accurate decision can be made on each application.
“The digital mechanics means we have a very high customer satisfaction rate,” said Goncalves. “Our Net Promoter Score is very high at 78.”
The impact for retailers is why so many are keen to offer ONEY Buy Now Pay Later.
“Because of the simplicity of the customer journey we see users come back again to use the product. The second impact for retailers is that the average basket size is significantly increased. We usually reach a 50 per cent growth of the average basket. And the beauty of this product is the fact that we attract a lot of new customers who are not fans of traditional forms of consumer finance. They want something smoother. This is a very important point for the retailer.”
ONEY also prides itself on ease of adoption by vendors. Being an international company means it can handle even the largest global retailers. It is also straightforward for small and medium sized retailers.
“We are in seven countries, and this will increase, but we have the same API for every country. This means we can offer a global solution.”
The result is that ONEY is trusted to deliver a solution, which is evident in the growth rates seen in Romania.
“We started in Romania at the beginning of 2021, and in ten months we already attracted big players such as Auchan, Altex, Flanco, Elefant.ro, Evomag, Ideall. And others.”
In addition to Buy Now Pay Later, ONEY offers a standard suite of credit products. It’s hugely successful here too, but needed to quickly transform its offering to stay ahead of the competition. FintechOS played a key role.
“We are present in stores across Romania,” said Goncalves. “We offer credit cards, and personal loans from 12 to 36 months. We were under pressure as the sector is not very dynamic right now.”
The ONEY method had a number of flaws: “In terms of customer journey it was very complicated. It was also complicated for the partner doing the selling. There were additional pain points. We worked with a number of partners, and each solution had a different interface. Each time people had to input the information of the client, which was not efficient.”
Worst of all the process featured paper-based steps. It had to be re-thought.
“We worked with FintechOS to rebuild the digital platform,” said Goncalves. “We built a common interface connected to all banks. We reduced as much as possible the fields for customers, as the main driver was to reduce the time to wait. This was a long, long process!”
The result was a streamlined system. Customers enjoyed minimum digital form-filling. Everything that can be auto-filled is done so. There’s no duplication of effort.
And naturally, zero paper.
“We wanted to switch to a success-fees based model. We were able to do this, and our efficiency greatly improved, thanks to the unified application.”
Productivity is up 20 per cent across the product suite – vital as labour is in short supply in Romania and across Europe. And now 50 per cent of the credit production is done by the employees of the retailer, a key objective of the project.
He adds in earnest: “I would like to congratulate all the teams involved – my teams, FintechOS teams, and my bank partners. This project was very important.”
Credit is a ferocious market: competitive and fought over by fintechs worth tens of billions of euros. ONEY is proving that the secret to expanding share in this market is to focus on the experience of both customers and partners. Cost is a factor, but no brand can win on that metric alone.
The Lessons from ONEY:
Click here to watch the full recording of this FintechOS Leap session.
