Installment Services (BNPL) in Russia

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2023: The volume of the Russian installment services market for the year increased to 180 billion rubles

At the end of 2023, the volume of the Russian installment services market reached 180 billion rubles. This is one of the fastest growing segments of the domestic financial industry, as stated in the materials released in June 2024.

We are talking about the sphere of BNPL - Buy Now Pay Later (buy now, pay later): these are payment services for purchases, mainly small, in parts. This model allows you to divide the payment amount into four equal parts, with transactions every two weeks. To issue a BNPL, you only need a phone number to which the confirmation code will come at the time of payment.

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According to the Kommersant newspaper, the first BNPL services appeared in Russia in 2021 - Dolami from Tinkoff Bank and Split from Yandex. Then they were joined by Sberbank (Pay in Parts), Alfa Bank (Podeli), CFT (PayStep), Ozon ( Ozon Installments). The fintech group Denum, founded by IFC MigCredit and MCC Papa Finance, announced its intention to enter this market.

According to Frank RG, in 2022, the share of purchases using BNPL services in Russia was no more than 1% of the e-commerce market. At the end of 2023, this figure reached 1.5%, that is, increased by one and a half times. The value is projected to be approximately 1.8% by the end of 2024.

As of the end of 2023, according to Yandex, only 6% of Russians have used BNPL at least once: this means that "there is a lot of space for competition in the market." Sergey Shirokov, director of the Borrow and Save department of Sberbank, says that the number of providers in the area under consideration will grow. According to analysts, regulation can have a significant impact on the development of the market: stricter controls can slow its growth. The segment may also be pressured by a decline in consumer spending.^[1]

2022: 10-fold growth in installment services market

In 2022, the total turnover in the BNPL segment (buy now, pay later - "buy now, pay later," payment for purchases in parts) in Russia reached several tens of billions of rubles, market participants told Kommersant in January 2023. According to them, in comparison with 2021, installments showed tenfold growth.

The total volume of purchases with the Shares service (owned by Tinkoff) since its launch in April 2021 has exceeded 10 billion rubles, the Tinkoff press service told the newspaper.

The turnover of installment services in Russia for the year increased 10 times

In addition to Tinkoff, there are also similar services, for example, for, Sberbank, "," Alfa-BankYandex"Center for Financial Technologies" and. Ozon The dynamics of installment services differs from the situation in the stagnant consumer lending market, a source in the Kommersant financial market said. The growth and decline in indicators in this area in 2022 is due to the fact that new players entered the market, technology was debugged, he said. Sberbank

By January 2023, the Central Bank was already interested in BNPL products, since they act as an analogue of bank lending. The regulator is discussing plans to bring together consumer lending legislation and legislation regulating installment services.

This means the introduction of requirements for informing consumers and the content of the contract, limiting the amount of penalties for delay, the buyer's ability to prohibit the assignment of claims. The client should have the opportunity during the "cooling period" to refuse installments along with the return of goods, according to the Central Bank.

Regulation would ensure adequate weighting of such loans on risk, as well as establish uniform standards for working with them, experts interviewed by the newspaper note. The lack of regulation can lead to a relatively large information asymmetry, when information about the properties of a credit product will not be disclosed in accordance with the requirements applied to standard consumer loans, said ACRE Valery Piven, head of the rating group of financial institutions.^[2]

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