Trying to answer a few of the above:
As mentioned above, we just launched “pay early”. Other things we’re exploring:
- Not taking the first instalment up front as discussed above.
- Behind the scenes credit/ affordability changes (the credit limits we offer customers).
- An option to pay in full on your next payment date.
- Letting customers pick a default plan for virtual (or physical) card purchases.
- Letting customers change their monthly payment date.
- Cost calculator so you can “simulate” a purchase before making it.
- Design of the pay extra/ pay early flows at a flex vs transaction level. eg. Letting @michaelw90 pay off the whole Flex balance rather than only each transaction individually.
As well as a couple of other bits that I won’t talk about 
Note that these are all things we’re thinking about, not things we’ll definitely do!
There are 2 sides to this coin:
- Customer experience - As we’ve seen above, some customers do prefer to pay the first instalment upfront - but overall, more customers prefer not to have the first instalment taken upfront. In addition to what customers “prefer” another issue with the first instalment upfront is around explainability and “edge cases” - eg. we get customers who sign up for Flex and try make a transaction only for it to decline due to not having 1/12th of the transaction amount in their current account - We get feedback that this is confusing and isn’t a great experience - it’s also quite hard to explain.
- Commercial outcome - Not taking the 1st instalment means we hold higher interest free balances which in the past may have been fine, but with an increasing Bank of England interest rate means we have more money lent out at 0% rather than sat in the Bank of England earning interest.
As you can probably guess - there’s a whole load more to this that I’m not sharing but this is the high level picture - I’ve also purposely not shared any scales eg. what proportion of customers prefer it one way vs the other. Note that customers can still chose to pay extra/ pay early and have the same experience as before if they prefer paying the first instalment straight away.
See what I said above about things we’re exploring