Michael Khoi - 'Buy Now, Pay Later' in Central Asia and the Levant (ZoodPay)
Four letters: BNPL Buy now, pay later. It’s all the craze these days. Square, for example, just announced plans to buy the Australian BNPL company Afterpay for...get this: 29 BILLION dollars. On the side of the equator, Swedish BNPL player Klarna raised $639 million in their recent round at a $45.6 BILLION dollar valuation….and the US based BNPL Affirm, who IPO’d earlier this year, has today a $33 billion market cap. Wow. But what is BNPL? Well: it depends who you ask. Ask a consumer - that is, you or me shopping online, and it's a way to buy an expensive piece of furniture or the new iPhone in instalments instead of upfront, all at once. Ask an e-commerce player - that is an Amazon or an online D2C brand, and it’s a way to drastically increase checkout conversion rates. Ask a financial advisor, and well, it could be just another way for people to take on really bad debt they just cant afford… But ask Michael Khoi, founder and CEO of ZoodPay and ZoodMall? BNPL is a way of empowering a mother in Uzbekistan earning 400 dollars per month to buy clothes for her child. It's about letting the young Iraqi buy groceries before his pay check comes in It’s about giving the 8 MILLION Jordanians who don’t have access to credit….access. And - in bringing BNPL with ZoodPay to the likes of Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Iraq, Lebanon, and Jordan - Michael’s also caused an e-commerce wave in the form of ZoodMall, a digital platform that gives access to interest-free, personal loans and….what he calls ‘necessary shopping’ to over 110 million people. And in the process, he’s just raised….nearly 40m dollars in one of Central Asia’s biggest Series B rounds EVER. Michael...ZoodPay...they’re not here to burden customers with debt to buy a new car, no - the average loan they make is $100. Instead, they’re here to make life for Uzbek, Kazakh, Iraqi, Lebanese, Jordanian...and soon other customers...just a little bit easier.