So you’re in the store about to make a massive purchase by tapping your credit card, when suddenly, you hesitate. This is about to make a huge dent in your wallet in one fell swoop, so you decide against it. You might have one less problem to worry about soon as Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) service provider Splitit (ASX: SPT) is teaming up with payments acceptance solutions company Ingenico to provide in-store, tap now, pay later services. 

Australia is a vast market for BNPL, with over six million customers in 2020 choosing the option when shopping online. It allows you to pay a certain percentage of the price once, then pay the rest in instalments, thus easing the strain on your bank account. Sadly, physical stores don’t offer the same. 

That’s what Splitit and Ingenico are aspiring to change. Ingenico has brought on Splitit Payments, a white-label service that allows customers to pay in instalments using their cards at checkout. Given that over 70% of commerce occurs in in-store checkout lanes, the three-year deal brings the popular BNPL service into that arena.

Splitit CEO Nandan Sheth commented, “By 2027, the number of consumers using instalment payments is expected to surpass 900 million globally, while at the same time, 75% of commerce is anticipated to remain in-store1 where legacy BNPL services have struggled to deliver a low friction in-lane solution. The Ingenico and Splitit solution prevents checkout delays and reduces abandoned sales by providing a seamless experience for card holders.”

As per the announcement, the deal will integrate “Splitit’s white-label Instalment-as-a-Service (IaaS) solution” within Ingenico’s innovative, “cloud-based Payments-Platform-as-a-Service (PPaaS)” to deliver the first one-touch, pay-later functionality on a point-of-sale (PoS) terminal (any more hyphens and this sentence will look like a web address).

Basically, customers can tap their cards through the service and select the pay-in-instalments option even while at physical stores. It will reduce friction, and customers will incur no additional interest. Will this encourage excessive spending? Probably. 

Head of Sales and Strategic Partnerships at PPaaS for Ingenico, Michael Balzer, said, “Splitit and PPaaS are natural partners. PPaaS is all about facilitating how people pay and what services they can access at the point-of-sale. Splitit is reinventing instalment payments at the point of sale in a way that makes it easy for merchants to propose this option to its customers, and PPaaS can help them do this in a simple and effective way. Including Splitit in our portfolio of partners is a testament to how important we believe in-store, easy-to-use BNPL will be in the future.”

Huge among in-store payment solutions, Ingenico is a technology partner for over 1,000 banks, acquirers, ISVs (independent software vendors), payment aggregators and FinTech companies. It has 35 million POS terminals worldwide as it services various businesses.

Combining Ingenico’s Ppaas with Splitit’s IaaS (it must be a real pain in the aaS when you can’t find the right acronym for your service), the two companies plan on reinventing payment gateways.

Sheth added, “This partnership will allow us to penetrate a highly underserviced market for instalment payments with [a] one-of-a-kind solution.”

The agreement comes into effect today and will continue for three years. Then, it will automatically renew for one year yearly unless either party decides to throw in the towel three months before the end of the ongoing term. Splitit did not provide any revenue guidance for now, as it would all depend on customer adoption.