Purposeful BNPL in an emerging market, with Mark McChlery

My career in consumer credit started in South Africa, a little over twenty years ago, when making access to credit fairer for the lower tiers of the economic pyramid meant investing resources to build better credit scores so that we could bring our rates below the statutory maximum. We were young and idealistic, but still, by starting with a lender’s mindset we figured that the answer lay in an iteration of small improvements that might bring APRs down little by little.

And perhaps, if I was asked then where rates would be today, success would have seen average APRs down from around 60% to maybe 40%, or even 30% if I’d been feeling optimistic. But not 0%.

Of course not, that would’ve been crazy. Except, as it turns out, it wasn’t.

By re-imaging what a budgeting tool could look like, PayJustNow, a South African BNPL with a purpose, have created an interest-free three-month instalment offering for those often overlooked by the big credit ptoviders. In this episode, I speak to Mark McChlery (co-founder Chief Data and Analytics Officer) to hear about the philosophy behind the business, and how they’re building tools for consumers and the communities in which they exist.

You can find out all you need to know about PayJustNow at https://payjustnow.com/

Or to learn more about Weaver FinTech, their holding company, head over to https://www.weaverfintech.com/

And if you’d like to see the FOM x Kolisi shoes mentioned, you can check those out over here: https://freedomofmovement.co.za/product-category/men/mens-footwear/

You can learn more about myself, Brendan le Grange, on my LinkedIn page (feel free to connect), while you can find my action-adventure novels on Amazon, some versions even for free.

If you have any feedback, questions, or if you would like to participate in the show, please feel free to reach out to me via the contact page on this site.

Regards,

Brendan

The full written transcript, with timestamps, is below:

Mark McChlery 0:00

PayJustNow is not marketed at a consumer, it is built for the South African consumer. And so long as we stay and fit with that consumer, by them knowing that we are for them and not at them, then we can not only be a movement but a revolution.

This was predicated on a quote from Benjamin Franklin, who said that there are three types of people in this world: those who are immovable, people who don't get it or just simply don't want to do anything about it; then there's people in the world who are moveable, they see the need for change, and are prepared to listen to a new idea; and then the people who move, you know, they just get out there and make things happen. And everybody who's part of PayJustNow is part of the movement. And hopefully we can compel the movable part of our population to jump on board into this movement as well, you know, and in no time this movement will turn into a revolution. There's no doubt about it.

Brendan Le Grange 0:59

20 years ago, I started working at what was then the cutting edge of consumer credit in South Africa. In partnership with CapitalOne, we were arguably the first mainstream lender to bring across-the-lifecycle risk-based strategies to market, and we were able to bring about significant change. But these things work in cycles. And now we appear to be on the cusp of the next big wave as a bevvy of fintechs brings their fresh ideas. Chief among those, as it appears to be around much of the world, is buy now pay later. Welcome to How To lend money to strangers with Brendan le Grange.

One of the good friends I made during my MBA had Danish family and so, 13 years ago, when my wife and I moved to Copenhagen, those cousins very kindly took time off to show my wife around the city while I settled into the office. To say thank you, we invited them around to dinner as soon as we'd moved out of the hotel and into our first proper apartment. We invited them for 7pm. They arrived at 7pm. I was still shopping at 7pm.

I don't think those poor girls ate until about 20:30. In Denmark, this is a serious faux pas, in South Africa it is simply how we treat time, which is to say flexibly - an attitude that is reflected in some rather unique scaling of time. From 'right now' on the urgent side of the spectrum and becoming increasingly vague and less committal as we go through 'now' to 'now now' to 'just now' the furtherest out of all our timeframes.

Albeit 'just now' finally has a fixed definition, at least according to today's guest, Mark McCleary, co-founder of PayJustNow, a South African BNPL that offers three interest free instalments to increase access to credit, and perhaps just as importantly, increase access to e-commerce to consumers who were underserved in the past.

But yeah, welcome to the show, Mark. When I had a quick look at your background, it's non traditional, I would say, for a Chief Data and Analytics Officer in financial services - I see restaurants, office equipment, some dealmaking, some entrepreneurship... So, before we talk about PayJustNow, do you want to just spend a few minutes talking about your background, about what what brought you to to where you are today?

Mark McChlery 3:25

Yeah, for me, I mean, this is the worst part of any interview, to discuss yourself, but I'll try and do it without being too self deprecating. I think, you know, for me, it's been a 20 plus year career of finding my way to this place, you know. Starting in restaurants, I think, is quite quite a vital building block for anybody who wants to be of service. It teaches you a lot of humility, and it takes hard graft, nothing comes easily. And then from there I went into business to business sales, you know, as you mentioned, office automation. I think that's probably one of the toughest industries to make any success of note, those that are successful in have got scars on their backs for it and a wealth of experience and knowledge. And I think what it teaches you is look for different ways of approaching a problem because you've literally got to sell something that's a grudge purchase to a business.

I got to the end of the road of my office automation journey as CEO of Seartec which in Southern Africa is the importer and distributor of Sharp Electronics. And it was there where I was exposed to a role which required a really detailed analytical view, turning around what was a 40/ 45 year old company to go and be relevant again. It was a period of my life that I learned a great deal and, more importantly, I took away from that the importance of being able to cast your eye across the fields rather than just looking at targets and try hunt it down.

After that all ended, I took a sabbatical and it was at that stage where I was introduced through friends to the concept of open source data and worked on a project called Passmarked where we attempted to curate the world's internet code and build a tool that allowed people to measure their own websites from a performance and content and security position. And through there, really immerse myself in what I think was probably the most powerful contributor to PayJustNow - just understanding the fundamental power of open source.

It underpins the success of any major software or software language in that it is free at the point of distribution. And that is the hurdle that guarantees mass adoption, utility and ultimately contribution to, you know, to their product to make it grow and remain relevant. So I think each of them would be in good standing to approach pages now armed with the anecdotal learnings of past and also the ability to try and think how we can change things for the better.

Brendan Le Grange 5:55

Yeah, and I think when we look at FinTech or we talk about disrupting it for the big banks, you've come from understanding sales, from understanding customer demand, and built a financial product, rather than coming from financial products and trying to make them different. Let's have a little look at PayJustNow - what was the founding story and sort of vision behind the business? And maybe if you could also just explain what it is that you're doing on a day to day basis?

Mark McChlery 6:23

Yeah, sure. I think just before I touch on the founding story, I think that really is the most important caveat is that in boardrooms all across the world, people talk about Darwin's survival of the fittest. And it's normally done with high tempo voices and a bit of enthusiasm in the voice, you know, try and get people motivated to go out there and succeed. But it's always taken from who speaks it to say that you need to be the strongest, you need to be the fastest, you need to be the most fierce, outwit outlast and out compete whoever's trying to eat your lunch. And I think we see it as survival of the fittest in that context has often been misunderstood or misquoted, in that the thing that fits the best survives. And every day, our approach is to find a way to make PayJustNow fit better for our Merchant partners, and for the consumers that use it.

And so long as we can remain steadfast to that approach, I think, you know, our sustainability and longevity is ensured.

in terms of how PayJustNow began, I think, as with all storied South African ideas, it started with a braai. That braai led to a phone call, which became a meeting, and it's resulted in what we're talking about today: PayJustNow. Which is effectively South Africa's answer to a successful FinTech movement globally, where we enable and empower consumers to buy now and pay just now - the 'just now' is a South African'ism, you have to be a Saffa to really get it straight away. It's a colloquial South African term, which is an expression of time, you know, sometime between 'now' and 'later', but never 'immediately' as in 'yes dear, I'll mow the lawn just now'. And that shouldn't be confused with 'now now', which has a much greater sense of urgency!

So Craig Newborn, who was the original founder, took that conversation over a lamb chop and marinated this idea of bringing what is, and was, a notable, globally validated FinTech concept of BNPL to South Africa. He brought with him years of experience building and supplying bespoke technology solutions to the large ISPs on the African continent. And together with myself, who took that very first phone call, we started ideating this first iteration of PayJustNow. And as with all things, its roots and its growth is underpinned by the people and the passion that they bring to it.

And so as we started building it out, we realised that the one leg to this tier was we needed somebody with remarkable and noteworthy experience in the retail sector. And so Craig reached out to a varsity mate of his Greg (van der Riet). The three of us from there, you knoe, started toiling away. This motley crew of founder friends, we immersed ourselves in a body of work that we're proud of and we started to build a team of people that truly care for.

And hopefully, in the days, weeks, years to come can be credited for building a game-changing service for the South African consumer, hopefully, noting that it was all for free to that same consumer.

Brendan Le Grange 9:07

Yeah, I think buy now pay later is an idea that's working in many markets, but it's worth calling out that within South Africa it's not just a more convenient way to pay, it's actually also a whole new access to credit in a market that has been underserved and that's left a vacuum that's attracted in some less savoury business models in the past. Suddenly, as you say, you're offering free so instead of 100% APRs. It's now a free and structured way without those hidden fees and exorbitant rates that maybe used to exist in this world. And I think that's a double benefit to this BNPL model in markets like South Africa, as it is in other developing markets.

Mark McChlery 9:52

Yeah. 100% I think I think that's quite an important part of this discussion is, you know, it's quite easy to to look at a globally-validated business model and then try and take a hammer and tong to it and fashion it or to fit it to the context of the market you're trying to build it in.

The difference between where BNPL is successful versus South Africa: it's almost a dichotomy of those markets. If you look in Australia, we its got its storied beginning, Australia has got a base interest rate of 1.5%, I think, down to 1% now. But in South Africa, at the time when we started building this, our base prime interest rate was 10.5%. And although you want to offer and build a product that has utility for a consumer, you know, the real world practicalities is that cost of capital is a significant part of your ability to do this. And it is probably the biggest bulk of what costs we incur to be able to offer this to a consumer. And again, in South Africa with unsecured credit default rates as high as they are, we were we were initially looked at as pursuing folly.

You know, this kind of work in a space that has such a toxic credit environment that lends itself to what you referred to in your missive was predatory type products that enter the market, you know, payday loans, high interest retail credit, they cover and insure that credit risk by charging fees, by charging the max allowable interest rate, that is effectively taking a share of that consumer's wallet and disappearing it into the ether to fund this product that they're desperate to use and for which they have little alternative. That really is where I think PayJustNoow has an idealistic and an important role to play.

And so that is that we empower the consumer who was going to consume anyway, we're not getting them to shop when they weren't going to shop, what we are, is we offering them a budget tool. So it's a smarter way to shop. And if you sit down and do the maths, in a very rudimentary way, it just makes sense. And that's, you know, out growth up until now and all that is attributed to people just sitting down and saying, well, first of all, I don't believe it, is it what it says on the box? And, you know, with social proof and experience, and they then realise that, hey, hang on, this is what it what it says it is. And it is the smart way to buy what I was going to buy anyway without paying any fees or interest. And I think that's the tipping point.

Brendan Le Grange 12:11

My first role in South Africa, I won't mention the name, but I was working with a joint venture with CapitalOne and a local bank and we had two portfolios. So I was working on the credit card side, but a big part of our business was with a mass market lender. And we brought a lot of modelling innovation, and we built a lot of scorecards and understood customer risk very well. But that still left a very high APR because we would understand who had a 50% chance of default versus who had a 25% chance of default, and we could adjust APR accordingly but 25% default is 25% default. And it calls back a bit to your background where we discussed in the intro in our lenders mindset, you lend money you get an interest in it has to compensate for your losses, and that's the way it is.

But one of the clever parts with buy now pay later, is reimagining that income model, you found a way around that to be able to offer these free instalment loans. So obviously, I don't want you to give away too many secrets. But can you talk a little bit about how you overcome that issue, which to a banker, to anyone who's worked in lending traditionally, would look at it and say, yeah, you're crazy, you can't give interest free loans to people with 33% average default rates (if we look at personal loans in the country).

Mark McChlery 13:24

Yeah. So I think the key distinction here is that where payJustNow's point of departure was, we began with ecommerce, okay, so that for us was imperative. It put us in front of the type of consumer who understood technology, who frequently was looking to shop online in a market that was sub 2% of the retail GDP was online. We didn't have to overcome the barrier of trust, like, can I load my card details onto my profile? Because this person had experience with with e-commerce. So that was quite important, you know, as a barrier to entry was to start talking to the early adopters in digital commerce.

The other thing was that we needed to fashion our offering based on what the South African consumer needed or wanted or called out for without even realising that they were. The key difference between Australasia and South Africa is that everybody in South Africa, bar the casual workers and temp workers, are paid monthly, where in Australia and New Zealand, even if you're a CEO, you're bound to have been paid every fortnight or every week - that's why they collect four instalments every two weeks. And in South Africa, we had to model it take three instalments. Three wasn't just a thumb suck, it was a an empirical calculation on what can we afford, you know, in terms of max term because we can only collect at one time a month.

And that, it'ss not a credit facility, it's a budget tool. And now this just gives them the ability to shop now, maybe experiment, maybe they they've never bought from this website before and they don't know if they're going to get what they think they're going to get, and if they have to return it their wallets is only one 1/3 less rich to the value of the order. Our job there was to partner with merchants of repute to make sure that that was not going to be any story in our downfall.

And then the other thing is that to South African consumer, as well as globally, the consumer has been educated maliciously over years, you know, when you sign up for your retail credit, you see your opening balance, your credit limit, pay your monthly fee and your signup fee, and when you do your first transaction, there's also a collection fee. And all of these fees are rolled up into what is effectively the effective APR. And over time, you start getting those letters in the mail, and you're conditioned to look at opening balance, closing balance and minimum payment due and available to buy. It doesn't take long before the only thing you look at on that paper is your open to buy and minimum payment due - and at least that teaches the consumer some sort of rough arithmetic, so you can add that to that and now you know what you can shop for this month!

And all it did was serve to push the consumer to the edge of what they could afford funding that operation with the fees and the interest rates, which probably compounded daily. So it was quite important to us that when we built PayJustNow. Not only did we fit in with operating lifestyle of this consumer, but also that we did it in a transparent way - what you see is what you get.

And remember, the consumer is not our customer, the merchant partner is our customer. And if you love a brand, and you buy from them two or three times a year with PayJustNow we may be empowering you to buy more of that product, or more often. I think back to our very first merchant partner -they had no reason to, but they gave us a chance. They're called Freedom of Movement known by the acronym FOM. And they at the time probably had about 20 products, they were above average value, they were durable, they were aspirational, was high quality, and at that time in 2019, the last relaxed memory that we have was the World Cup in 2019. You know, they traded off the popularity of what was their most iconic product and that was the FOM x Kolisi. It was veldskoen shoes, which they made in collaboration with the Springbok captain Siya Kolisi, in the same year that he took our nation's dreams and team to Japan and inspired us all with that scintillating campaign that gave South Africa yet another Rugby World Cup title.

So I think along the way, partnering with merchants, storied merchants that have a following was quite an important thing to get right from the beginning. And then we needed to overlay that with consistent, predictable, transparent service to the consumer that could build trust.

Brendan Le Grange 17:26

I think it's really pleasing to hear how deeply woven it is into here, because a lot of narrative hysteria around buy now pay later is that, you know, it is the next payday lending, it is encouraging runaway spend, but you've touched on a few key points that I think are really where it's got the strongest message (1) obviously, interest free, if you're doing everything right, but (2) is that old story about how it's expensive to be poor, that if you're rich, you can afford that one good pair of shoes, it's going to last you for a few years and over those few years, that's cheaper than buying four or five pairs of shoes that collapse on themselves. But you need that initial cash outlay, so you're providing it so people can buy better quality goods, and actually in the long run lasting longer.

And then also, with the credit card model, I would have a credit card because I wanted to buy that one pair of shoes I couldn't afford to pay at once, but then all my grocery shopping starts falling on there because as you say I keep getting this thing that says you've got R5,000 to spare, you've got R5,000 to spare and all you need to pay is R100 a month... and that sits there, and it either actively or just passively sits on the back of the consumer's mind saying this is money you can spend. And so actually, in most cases, a credit card is more likely to push people towards these debt traps, and it's more expensive.

So BNPL, as long as it's done right, as long as there's this sort of sensible approach to it - and it sounds like you've gone beyond sensible and you've actually woven a just cause into the vision - it is just fairer to the consumer (and I guess we could talk about what it's done for e-commerce as well, you know, COVID was a perfect time to push a lot of people to e-commerce) but it does seem like a far better approach to consumer credit.

Mark McChlery 19:02

Yeah. 100% I think you're touching on some of the narrative that's going on in established mature markets like the UK and I've got some thoughts on that, in that if you look at Visa and Mastercards debts over the last couple of years, they have publicised and noted a significant downward trend on the adoption and use of credit cards. And then at the same time there's the significant increase in the use of debit cards, you know people favouring to use what cash they have over credit. So I know, and I've seen ,and then read, significant volumes of narrative where the banks are actually trying to damp the global adoption of buy now pay later. You know, if you just go onto YouTube and look at it, you've got for every 1 positive analysis of buy now pay later you've got 8... which, you don't have to dig very deep for you can find out who's lobbying against buy now pay later.

But you've got to wear kid gloves because you have to fit best and you have to continually look to fit better. And that doesn't mean maximising your profit from consumer A so that you can offer this to consumer B. It's about empowering retail GDP growth, which hopefully spins off into improved employment, which hopefully spins off into greater innovations and downstream purchases from manufacturing and imports. And in South Africa, it's very much needed, you know, to grow our economy, is to do something where PayJustNow is not marketed at a consumer, it is built for the South African consumer, and so long as we stay and fit with our consumer by them knowing that we are for them and not at them, then hopefully, we can not only be a movement, but a revolution,

Brendan Le Grange 20:42

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Mark McChlery 20:53

If you think about it, you also can't trust the consumer to always be really judicious with how they spend their money. So we've taken active steps, which I think go a long way to demonstrate the realness of our approach. So for example, if you are signing up with PayJustNow for the first time, you are assigned a credit facility and that credit facility is the amount that we are prepared to split into three instalments for you. You go on to make your first instalment and hopefully in a couple of days, if you bought it online, you get those goods.

We're also omni-channel so we're available in-store now as well. So you could also even probably walk out of a Salomon shoes or a Cape Union Mart with the goods that you've just paid your first instalment on but you cannot use your PayJustNow facility again until that entire three instalment order plan has been fully paid back. And you've got to use us with distinction ie not miss payments.

And this is the time that we take to educate that consumer on what PayJustNow is, hoping that once they've used it successfully for the first time they'll go on to imagine that PayJustNow is not it's not credit, it's FinTech, yes, but it's a platform that enables them to participate as a consumer, and they get to imagine it in their own context. So for me, it might mean splitting the payments on a set of golf clubs, you know, for you, it might be a PlayStation 5, for my wife, it might be a handbag, you know, for everybody there's a place.

Brendan Le Grange 22:17

Yeah, and I think that's a really nice approach, building that education is key. When you are dealing with these consumers obviosuly, within the retail space, it accelerates that pressure that you feel of making a decision quickly. What sort of data are you using? Because I imagine a lot of your consumers are younger, perhaps not deep in with the traditional financial services, may not have thick bureau files, what sort of data are you looking at when you're making your decisions on who to open a facility for and indeed, how much to provide them?

Mark McChlery 22:51

Yeah, so I mean, typically, there are about 48 different data points, you know, some of them are declared by the consumer during the signup process, and then 'trust but verify', check it up and make sure that a the identity is correct, the location ties in with what they're trying to shop, the delivery address is near or close to where they've declared was their home, the information they've given us what's publicly available, do they have a credit score/ don't they have a credit score, if you don't have a credit score that doesn't rule you out, what it does is it just tells us that there's very little consumer behaviour on which we can predicate a decision on value.

And then over time, as you use it, we align what we've offered you with what is of utility. And again, it's you know, only being able to use it once for that first transaction, if you look at the average cart of e-commerce or even at the till now in-store, the average cart is about R1,380, somewhere around there, and so by making that very first payment of your first instalment to make that transaction live our risk is limited to the second and third instalment only, you know, and we've got to trust that you are going to service those two instalments we do have a late fee structure.

But that late fee by design is meant to discourage people from missing payments rather than punish them. And again, steps that we have have demonstrably taken to prove that is that we are fastidious about how we communicate to that consumer, we let you know the day before that instalment is due. If that instalment, for whatever reason, doesn't go through successfully on the day, we let you know that it failed, and we give you another 24 hours to make sure that that instalment is paid before a late fee is accrued. So we've communicated with you four times in your choice of communication channel before a late fee is accrued.

So that very first transaction is where you learn. You don't know what they know until they've been able to act. And if anybody is going to default, it's very likely they're going to default on the first transaction. And so once you see that this has utility, you you're going to prioritise making sure that you have access to this utility and if you do defaults, you can't use it again until you get.

Brendan Le Grange 25:02

So I was talking to an old colleague of mine in China, and he was talking about how the big super apps there that have come to dominate life so much, they get very small unsecured debt out but because that utility of being in that ecosystem is so high, they're seeing consumers completely value a payment to a Tencent, or to Alibaba, outstandings above everything bar, maybe, their mortgage. And it's flipped that script within the financial world where they go, well, people always pay the biggest one first.

Now for you, you've gotten in, you've bought some protections here, from a risk point of view, you've got your data, you've got your fallback plans, but six months after you launch, we go straight into COVID and the world goes kind of crazy, it must have been a wild time for you - on the one hand, ecommerce is rocketing, new channels, or new customers are being drawn to it through necessity, on the other hand, you've got this huge unknown risk of 'what's going to happen' on a model that was already something you had to prove out to the industry.

How was that first six months, first one year through COVID?

Mark McChlery 26:05

Yeah, man, I think, jeepers, it's gonna take a lot more thought, you know, to try and delve into something that's so fresh in the mind, but COVID did amplify PayJustNow's value.

In contrast to how globally ecommerce shot up versus South Africa, it wasn't as remarkable initially because our our stringent lock downs even extended to retail, where you couldn't shop online and expected delivery. With no end in sight, having just launched literally five months prior, we had a relatively low consumer base, we had probably about 20 or 30 merchants integrated with us, but luckily those merchants had such a following and such a fan base that we, after the initial dusts and shock settled, we thought, well, what we're going to do is we're going to do a free campaign and put all the money that we would have spent on marketing, just by going to these customers and saying, listen, you won't get your delivery and we can't tell you when you're going to get your delivery, but it's perilous times for this brand that you love - and if you want to shop with him, you can split your payments in three, and we will settle them immediately.

It was a genuine approach that we expected to maybe yield a couple of thousand transactions, but it actually became viral. This wasn't a sales pitch. This was like we community started to rally around brands that were in their community, that employed people in their community, or that simply made something that that meant you wanted to be in this tribe. And the momentum from there is really how I think it all began.

It became visible to other merchants that said, hey, hang on a second, why don't we sign up with PayJustNow. So we exceeded our merchant target through COVID, five times, than the budget that we'd set pre-COVID. And you know, over over time, the regulations lifted and people got their goods, and talkability continued. Serendipitous. If it didn't happen, we'd still be here, we'd still be talking the same story, but I can't tell you how big we'd have been.

And what that did is it hastened the need for us to find funding. You know, at the time, it was a team of the three founders and a couple of contractors and people we knew that were helping us build this, and build that, and cobbled together what is now effectively PayJustNow's stack. And so, ja, I think it was a terrible time for the economy, something that's gonna take years to recover from, but it spurred some innovation. I think that South African hybrid vigour, you know, that approach to meeting problems head-on, and it spurred some creativity, and also it gave the consumer who probably would not have ever shopped online, many, many days or four walls to then decide, hey, hang on, I'm missing out, let me have a look and dip my toes....

Brendan Le Grange 28:54

I've been out the country for 13 years now, so yeah, certainly not up to date on on the latest fashions. But when I cast my eye over your website, it's very clear that this is curated approach to the companies you're working with. This is not just 'go to Amazon', you've got local brands, as you said, within the communities, you've got small businesses that you're helping get off the ground, and building these genuine partnerships, rather than 'let's just grow as fast as we can, because some VC wants to see the number of customers grow very quickly'.

And then as you said, you went looking for finances, do you want to talk a little bit about the corporate side of things as well?

Mark McChlery 29:30

Sure, jeepers, that is a whole series of books as well. You know, you're eventually going to need funding, some way some how, and we got to a point where we it was, what we say in South Africa, fyndraai, it was getting quite tenuous and the growth was hastening our need to find a partner for funding. And I think back to all these VCs and incubators and corporate venturing channels that we were introduced to, you just go on to Twitter or or any sort of finance forum, they're all talking about how they're looking for businesses to get behind so that they can help stimulate growth in the economy and this and that and blah, blah, blah. The reality is that it's a typical sort of CFA approach every single time, if you don't know what it is, because you've never used it, you're excited by it, but the maths don't stack up and if they do, it doesn't stack up in a way that you think is possible, because you've only had a week or two to ever look at this and say, is this in the realm of possibility. And locally, in South Africa, that is tainted by experience, businesses fail - and fast - in South Africa.

And we eventually were introduced to Weaver FinTech head office out in in Mauritius. And what was endearing about that was that it is forward approach by everybody that that was involved in that process. And I think we found a home with a business, but also people that understand that longevity and sustainability follow doing things with intentional effort, and to add value rather than to create value and suck it out of whatever ecosystem you're trying to serve. They also, I mean, have got decades of experience, and notably a balance sheet that we can get excited about.

And so that means that we wouldn't sleep at night for different reasons than needing to find capital to settle our merchants. Now, it's just about, you know, making sure that we continue to grow and offer utility to the consumer in a way that we don't lose any relevance.

And yeah, I mean, we've made one or two mistakes along the way. But we're always quick to remedy those mistakes. And it's about an ecosystem in a partnership with a company that has your back that I think is is most important. Anecdotally, a couple of the entities that we felt most excited about the funding round, have actually gone on to try and build their own by buy now pay just now. You know, obviously only waking up a few months down the line. It's testament to the fact that BNPL - or buy now pay just now as I hope it globally could becoms referred to as - has a real home and a real utility in South Africa.

Brendan Le Grange 32:06

I think it's easy from the banker side to say - well, and I think you'll probably find a quote of me saying this somewhere on this show - but the concept of buy now pay just now is simple from a banking point of view, but I think as you hear more about it, and you hear about the different approach and much more customer embedded approach, yeah, we do see some financial services that can do that but if you just think about your bank, it's big and stable and safe, but it's certainly not aware of the the young brands that are emerging within your communities and ways of helping to make them grow.

So I think as soon as a traditional player starts to roll this out, very little of it is about lending and much more about it is on the stuff that banks don't traditionally excel at. But as you said, you are growing, you're taking on new merchants, new customers, if people want to learn more about ages. Now, if consumers want to work with you, or merchants want to work with pages now, where should they go to get all the information?

Mark McChlery 33:00

I hope they give this podcast a proper listen first, and then we are available online, we have apps that are in the app stores - so you can download PayJustNow in the app store of your choice. We are highly available, you know, in our app chat, in our 'contact us' medium on email, or simply just go to www.payjustnow.com.

And also, you know if you happen to see us at a brand that you happen to love or shop at quite avidly, and if we're there, just ask your sales clerk, they should be able to tell you exactly what I've told you now, because we intentionally made it to be easy to understand, digest, consume, and imagine in your own context.

Brendan Le Grange 33:40

Awesome, Mark, thank you so much for your time today. It's been an absolute pleasure having you on and yeah, the more I learn about the business, the more excited I am about the sort of FinTech that's coming out of South Africa.

It's great to see that come through and what it can mean to provide access to credit at affordable levels and in fair way. So yeah, been a pleasure to have you on.

Mark McChlery 34:00

100% Thank you, Brendan.

Brendan Le Grange 34:01

And thank you all for listening. If you enjoyed that, please do rate and review on your preferred podcast platform and share widely including on LinkedIn and while you they send me a connection request. The show is written and recorded by myself Brendan le Grange in Brighton, England and edited with assistance by Kane Hunter, show music is by Iam_Wake and you can find full written transcripts now in several languages, show notes and more content at www.howtolendmoneytostrangers.show.

And I'll see you again next Thursday.