Used wisely, Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) s a great product for consumers – deferred payments over multiple months, with no interest. On the surface, it seems like an ideal solution for all consumers, especially those looking for flexible payment options or a digitally integrated payment experience. 

Globally, BNPL e-commerce transactions reached US$342 billion in 2024, representing more than 5% of all global online purchases. (Just under a decade ago, this figure stood at $2.3 billion.) And it continues to grow: Affirm, one of the largest BNPL providers in the US, reported $10.4 billion in Gross Merchandise Volume (GMV) in its most recent quarter, up 43% YoY. Another provider, Klarna, processed $31.2 billion in GMV in Q2 2025 – a 19% increase compared to Q2 2024. 

Echoing global momentum, BNPL has carved out a strong foothold in South African retail. Weaver Fintech’s interim 2025 results highlight this growth. It’s subsidiary, PayJustNow, has processed a total GMV of R9 billion since 2023 and continues to attract more than 110,000 sign-ups each month. In 2025, customers used PayJustNow to purchase R5.2bn of product, nearly twice the value of product sold by South Africa’s leading online apparel retailer, TFG’s Bash (~R2.4bn).

BNPL operates in a regulatory ‘grey area’ in South Africa, as it did during its early growth phases in most other markets. BNPL is not credit; rather, it’s treated as a deferred payment product and therefore operates outside the regulatory constraints of the National Credit Act.

But growth in BNPL is starting to agitate the credit industry, with credit-industry bodiesbecoming more vocal about the need to regulate BNPL. An accusation against BNPL is that it ‘masks the deep structural risks’ that cause consumer harm through over-lending; and that it poses hidden risks to compliant credit providers.

In this note, we:

• Estimate the prevalence of BNPL across our data set and summarise the differences between each provider’s model.
• Reveal the proportion of customers with multiple BNPL accounts, and show the proportion of customers who also have other credit products.
• Use transaction values to estimate purchase values, and show what most customers are using BNPL to buy.

As we demonstrated in our report about Pepkor’s FoneYam product, and now with BNPL, new financing products are disrupting established credit retail businesses. Many of these are listed, and investors should pay attention… 

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