Product Strategy / Case study
BNPL Launch: 0 → 100K Users in 8 Months
Launched the BNPL product for a cross-border payments platform from scratch, full underwriting, repayment flows, collections, regulator briefings, to 100K users in 8 months through iterative agile discovery.
The operating decision, in context.
Took BNPL from product concept to 100K active users in 8 months. Built the full stack, eligibility, underwriting, repayment, dunning, collections, regulatory posture, and the consumer UX, using rapid agile discovery cycles and a tight feedback loop with credit and risk.
Evidence overview
What changed, and why it held.
Operator lensBNPL is a credit product first, a checkout product second. Treating it as the latter is how funds get burnt.
0→100K (8 months)
n/a→Discovery → live in 14 weeks
n/a→Within target band
The job to be done.
BNPL was being launched across the region by Tabby and Tamara, but most local merchants needed a partner who already handled their acceptance. The cross-border payments platform had the merchant base and rails; what was missing was a defensible BNPL product with a credit, risk and ops model that worked in Pakistan and could port to MENA.
What I built.
- Eligibility + underwriting engine (alt-data scoring + bureau where available)
- Repayment scheduling, dunning and collections workflows
- Merchant-facing BNPL integration (existing SDKs + new BNPL endpoints)
- Consumer onboarding KYC flow with friction-tier risk-based capture
- Regulator briefings + central-bank engagement on consumer-credit posture
- Analytics: cohort default tracking, ARPU per cohort, recovery funnel
Where I sat in the work.
CPO. Owned product strategy, regulatory engagement, partner stack (bureau, alt-data, collections), and the cross-functional discovery cadence with risk, credit ops and engineering.
What moved.
- Reached 100K active users in 8 months
- Discovery → first live merchant in 14 weeks
- Default rate held within target band through cohort-by-cohort tightening
- Created the product blueprint the platform is using for MENA expansion
What I chose against.
- Launched with bureau data only where available, alt-data scoring elsewhere, slower onboarding in low-data segments, but no skipped underwriting
- Built dunning + collections in-house instead of outsourcing, higher ops cost early, much tighter feedback into the credit model
What carries into the next build.
- BNPL is a credit product first, a checkout product second. Treating it as the latter is how funds get burnt.
- Cohort discipline is the difference between scale and a blowup. Track every cohort to maturity; do not average them.
- Regulator engagement should start before discovery, not after, especially in markets with developing consumer-credit law.
Relevant beyond this one platform.
The transferable core: shipping BNPL inside a regulated payments org, fast, without taking unmanaged credit risk, with underwriting and cohort discipline built in from the first cohort. Tabby, Tamara, BNPL-curious banks and BaaS providers all face that same question; only the logo changes.
Bring the context
Building through
real operating pressure?
Start with the decision, constraint or delivery problem in front of you. We can work out whether there is a useful fit.