BNPL Launch at Simpaisa: 0 → 100K Users in 8 Months

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.

BNPL was being launched across the region by Tabby and Tamara, but most local merchants needed a partner who already handled their acceptance. Simpaisa 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.

• 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

CPO. Owned product strategy, regulatory engagement, partner stack (bureau, alt-data, collections), and the cross-functional discovery cadence with risk, credit ops and engineering.

• 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 Simpaisa is using for MENA expansion

• 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

• 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.

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.