This is partly why I love the approach to credit that PayPal have taken. I don’t necessarily view these products as different solutions for different people, but rather as different tools for different jobs.
Each has values and drawbacks over the other in some situations. PayPal provides both and more, integrated into the checkout flow, where this admin, if any exist, ought to be done!
sidetrack
Monzo. In the chase thread we discovered recently how Chase take advantage of the 3DS process to provide some useful utility to customers: Change which account you spend from, shows you if the account has enough money and a prompt to transfer it if you don’t. Things you can do before confirming the transaction.
Flex would love to have this sort of functionality. It doesn’t have the advantage of plugging directly into the checkout process, but it can bridge that gap by bringing some of that into the 3DS process. Give me my plan options there before I authenticate the transaction, for instance.
end sidetrack
back to my point. PayPal Credit is both part credit card and part BNPL product, and you can choose how you want to use it. my hope, and expectation to an extent, is that Monzo Flex will evolve in its use cases and become more similar to what PayPal credit offer, with the advantage of having a card. Options. Flex at its heart, is a software solution to the problem of credit. And like all software, it can be updated and improved, and I suspect Flex will be. This is just version 1, and for the niche version 1 fills, it fills it very well. I very much hope future versions evolve to offer more tools for more jobs.
Down the road, I’d like to see flex default to behaving like your typical credit card, with an option to choose instalments later, similar to how you can Flex any debit card transaction from the past two weeks. Throw in interest free periods as standard for the initial few months of a purchase, and they’d be onto a winner I reckon.
PayPal credit is very nearly the perfect solution to credit in my view. It just lacks a card, customer support, and a proper disputes processes. Trying to raise a section 75 claim with them is nigh impossible, and can only be done via snail mail in the uk.
I’m still playing with Flex and getting as much use out of it as I can, by using it the way it’s intended, and I think I’m arriving at the same conclusion. It’s just BNPL with a card, and that’s just not how I like to do things in the vast majority of scenarios. The cool thing for me, which I think has the most utility is being able to go back in time and shift stuff to credit. Just a shame that loses out on section 75.