"It's so easy, isn't it?" How buy now, pay later can leave Britons struggling with debt

When Emma was shopping for clothes or makeup online and saw the option to pay later on the checkout page, "it sounded good," she says. "I said to myself, 'I can just pay this when I get paid'. But I quickly realized that what I had accumulated was not realistic to pay in a month, especially not when everything is due at the same time. time." Before long, she owed £900. She now has to pay £300 over the next few days and hasn't. She started using buy now, pay later on clothes, but once she was in a cycle of refunding purchases from previous months on each payday, she was soon using it for essentials like clothes. 'grocery. Emma says her limit was increased without her knowledge so she was spending more than she thought. "I always assumed that I was within my limit. I didn't consider that the limit had actually increased in the business model, in the context of tightening consumer belts and increased regulatory scrutiny. Go to the websites of many retailers - including Marks & Spencer and online fashion companies such as Asos - and they'll offer you a chance to "split the cost" through companies such as Klarna and Clearpay, or through their own long-running programs (such as those offered by online retailers Very and Littlewoods) The number of retailers with which Klarna, a Swedish company and one of the largest BNPL operators in the UK, works increased by 59 % to reach 22,000 over the past year.Apple is set to enter the BNPL market in the United States, giving Apple Pay users the option to spread their payments over four months without interest, PayPal offers it too. nt, and UK banks are joining us - Barclays has a BNPL deal with Amazon, NatWest launched a BNPL program in June and later in the year Virgin Money is launching a BNPL program.