ViaBill, the Danish Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) leader backed by international venture capital Headline and Blackfin announces it has raised a $120m equity and debt round led by London-based Fasanara capital.
Jan Lytje-Hansen, CEO and co-founder of ViaBill, explains the funding round: “We see huge demand for Buy Now Pay Later that isn’t limited to online stores. So together with our partner MasterCard we have developed a solution that can be used anywhere, online or in-store. We have rolled out this new BNPL product in Denmark, Spain, and the USA. Thanks to Fasanara Capital’s support, we can accelerate expansion.”
“80% of our consumers’ spending happens offline” continues Lytje-Hansen “While other large Buy Now Pay Later players like Klarna, AfterPay, and Affirm have successfully infiltrated the online payment space, there’s a lack of BNPL solutions that support brick and mortar shops. We solved this. Consumers around the world can download the ViaBill App, enter a limited set of data, and have ViaBill’s advanced credit decision engine immediately evaluate their creditworthiness. If successful, a virtual credit card is issued on the spot which the consumer can push to their wallet and use to pay as usual
ViaBill has tested the shopping behavior of roughly 11,000 consumers over the last quarter. The results show a massive uplift in BNPL transactions. On average the shopping frequency has tripled for users having our virtual or physical cards as the card is instantly pushed to ApplePay or GooglePay. “It’ll be interesting to see if offline BNPL will disrupt the payment mechanisms as rapidly as we’ve seen in the online space” ends Jan Lytje-Hansen.
Fasanara Capital CEO and co-founder, Francesco Filia, explains that “we see BNPL as a gamechanger in the payments space. Consumers of today want convenience and flexibility when they shop online and offline and at Fasanara Capital we want to support leaders in this space”.
