Point-of-sale lenders Synchrony Financial and Affirm are ramping up market exposure by integrating with partners that unlock new financing offers and business customers.
Synchrony Financial, for one, is working with ChargeAfter, a point-of-sale loan marketplace, for its integrated financing options it launched Monday.
The deal allows Synchrony’s merchant partners to enroll with a secondary lender beyond Synchrony to increase their customers’ credit application approval rates. Synchrony Financial, which spun out of GE Capital in 2014, has financed more than $140 billion in sales and holds $64 billion in deposits across 80.3 million customer accounts, according to the company’s website.
The Stamford, Conn.-based lender is using ChargeAfter’s platform, which hosts a network of lenders, to offer secondary financing options when Synchrony declines a credit application. The ChargeAfter platform passes the same consumer credit application to lenders along the credit spectrum for approval, so the consumer doesn’t have to go through extra steps or processes to be underwritten multiple times.
Sunnyvale, Calif.-based ChargeAfter, an alumnus of Bank Innovation’s sister accelerator INV Fintech, recently partnered with Visa to launch an installment loan product in the U.S. and scored investment from the $2.8 trillion MUFG in June.
“When you go through an omnichannel experience, you have this purchasing path that shows all the different moments that matter in a consumer’s journey,” CEO of Payments Solutions Neeraj Mehta told BI. “Those moments happen online, then back in-store, then online and back in-store and because of that, we need to have the capability to address that online application and offline application.”
The digital piece of this equation is ChargeAfter, Mehta said. The platform funnels digital applications to Synchrony’s merchant portal, called Business Center, which is used to manage credit applications and settlements, and access consumer information. Synchrony has spent the better part of five years modifying Business Center into a portal that APIs can plug into from the mainframe infrastructure on which it used to operate. Business Center is now poised to easily integrate with other online and in-store players, Mehta said.
The revamped Business Center infrastructure also enables Synchrony to run multisource financing on dApply, the bank’s patent-pending technology that allows businesses to add consumer-financing options to their website, social media and marketing by just copying and pasting a URL.
Meanwhile, point-of-sale lender Affirm last week partnered with Dutch payments platform Adyen, which allows merchants to accept payments online, in-app and in store. Amsterdam-based Adyen is used by eBay, Uber, Spotify and Etsy among others, and processed $285 billion in volume in 2019, a 51% year-over-year increase, according to the company’s website. The partnership integrates Affirm as a payment option for eligible Adyen merchants — only certain geographies, business models and products are applicable with Affirm, according to Brian Dammeir, president of North America at Adyen.
Adyen is integrated with Affirm via its single integration API, which Adyen uses for all its payment needs across hundreds of payment methods and geographies. Affirm’s payment options are enabled on multichannel capabilities for both online and in-store, Dammeir said. The design and build between Adyen and Affirm began late spring, he added.
Affirm works with more than 6,000 merchant partners and has provided more than 5.6 million consumers with alternative credit across North America.
