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Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) company Sezzle wants to make it easy for students.
The company on Tuesday (Dec. 20) launched a partnership with the Independent College Booksellers Association (ICBA), an advocacy group for college stores.
“Today’s generation of students is drowning in debt more than ever before in a never-ending cycle of inflated student loans, textbooks and living expenses,” Sezzle said in a press release.
“Textbook prices have skyrocketed for decades.” Between 1977 and 2015, textbook costs rose 1,041% and outpaced currency inflation by 238%. In recent years, an emphasis on textbook availability as a means of improving student outcomes has become a focus throughout higher education,” Sezzle added.
The partnership will see Sezzle work with ICBA stores to offer students the option to purchase textbooks, school supplies and college equipment and pay in four installments. The program is available in more than 230 stores in the US and Canada.
“Expensive textbooks can dangerously affect a student’s financial ability to receive an education,” the statement said. “Many students are forced to increase their credits or simply run out of basic text.”
This comes at a time when people are increasingly turning to BNPL for non-retail purchases such as medical procedures and education.
A recent PIMNTS study revealed that 43% of the paycheck-to-paycheck consumers we interviewed would be interested in availing BNPL for out-of-pocket medical procedures, while 43% would use it to finance home improvement services, 42% would use it for medicines and prescriptions, and 38% would use it to pay for education and certifications.
We also recently spoke with Heidi Hillis, an expert trainer at Fortuna Admissions, about the ways in which BNPL is changing the field of education.
“Our clients are mostly professionals, and the packages we sell are quite expensive, so customers often paid for them over a period of three to six months, and we got by by billing them on three invoices,” she said. she. PIMNTS. “But it became very difficult for us to handle, and we found Splitit to help us handle customer payouts.”
BNPL allowed Fortuna to improve its profits in two ways. The lack of interest payments allowed the company to drop its discounts and still offer an attractive value proposition. And outsourcing payments to a third party helped reduce administrative costs spent on managing the company’s installment payment system.
How consumers pay online with stored credentials
Convenience prompts some consumers to store their payment credentials with merchants, while security concerns give other customers pause. For “How We Pay Digitally: Stored Credentials Edition,” a collaboration with Amazon Web Services, PIMNTS surveyed 2,102 U.S. consumers to analyze the consumer dilemma and discover how merchants can win over those who wait.
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