The founder of a Yorkshire-based fintech business says his successful “buy now, pay later” platform is ready to level up and take on the industry big boys.
James Jones, the founder of AppToPay, spotted a gap in the market while working in his family’s designer fashion boutique, where he realised a lack of financing options meant they were missing out on many high-ticket sales.
After spending months researching his product, James, co-owner of Doncaster-based independent retailer, Robinsons of Bawtry, launched his new app in 2019, enabling independent retailers to offer customers instant 0% finance on purchases.
Following a successful startup period, AppToPay has recently celebrated its second birthday and is ready to go to the next level.
James said: “We’ve proven the concept to be a popular one and that the technology we’ve created works. We’re now looking to partner with established retail finance providers to allow us to expand our platform in to more retailers.
“We’ve built the whole platform in-house from scratch, self-funding the development and lending to date under our own FCA authorisation, we put our money where our mouth is to demonstrate that the system works correctly. Now we’re ready to take third party lenders on to the system to expand our offering to our users”
James piloted AppToPay in his own high-end retail store with impressive results, as the average transaction spend increased by 300% compared with non-AppToPay purchases. The retailer has also enjoyed an increase in the number of new consumers coming into the shop.
The number of people signing up to use the app is doubling month on month, so AppToPay is set for exponential growth in 2021 and beyond.
James explained: “I wanted to create a payment solution that gave consumers the best aspects of the most popular forms of payment, combining the spend ease of a credit card with the structured repayments of a loan. We’re allowing people to split a purchase into affordable monthly payments without incurring additional costs, and as repayments are received credit becomes available again to fund new purchases.”
With AppToPay, qualifying customers are approved for a revolving line of interest-free credit of up to £2,000 with a choice of repayment period for each purchases of between two and twelve months.
James added: “It’s been a long journey, taking the concept from an idea put down on post-it notes, through a long refinement process to get it to where we are now, with a fully-automated app based platform that handles everything from credit applications, transactions, account management and repayment collections.”
“Consumers that have switched to the service already are loving it,” James said. “We regularly get great feedback from our users and lots of them are on their second, third or even seventh transaction with us.
“Our goal is to make AppToPay a split payment shopping hub with a retailer directory, allowing consumers to search within the app to see where they can buy anything they wanting AppToPay to spread the cost.”
“It took us 18 months to attract our first 2,000 account applications, fast forward a few months and we’re now attracting around 2,000 new user sign ups each month, there’s a huge opportunity in front of us, through partnership with established lenders I’m sure we can make it a huge success”
