Reinventing
the shopping experience
with BNPL

Overview

Founded in Tokyo, Paidy is a ‘Buy Now, Pay Later’ platform for consumers to make purchases online and in-store using only their name, phone number and email address. Paidy is optimized for mobile and instant checkout, allowing consumers to buy things without a credit card or pre-registration, and then pay for them each month in a consolidated bill. The company uses proprietary technology to score creditworthiness, underwrite transactions and guarantee payment to merchants.

Idea

Paidy stands out among BNPL firms globally. It serves consumers in Japan, a place where few other big BNPL players are competing because the market is famously difficult to enter. The reason: people in Japan don’t use credit cards as frequently as in other cultures – instead, they typically use cash and pay in person. This is where Paidy found its niche with a frictionless service that users could trust by paying at convenience stores and vendors could increase their conversion rates, average order values and repeat purchases.

With a desire to expand beyond the standard BNPL use case, Paidy’s next phase faced some big challenges. First, how can their current BNPL product be enhanced to include e-commerce? And is it possible to design a seamless shopping platform that addresses different needs from existing online marketplaces? To answer these, Paidy turned to Star for end-to-end product development support and broad strategy, design and FinTech expertise.

Project

From the beginning, establishing an agile approach and methodology was essential. This project turned into a hugely international collaboration for both Paidy and Star – with teammates located in the UK, Germany, Ukraine, Vietnam, France, Poland and Japan. Our fully remote team carried out extensive planning and onboarding workshops and strategized for continuous improvement. This included frequent product demonstrations with Paidy’s upper management and joint retrospective meetings to foster better teamwork, efficiency and accountability.

The project’s complexity and enterprise-to-enterprise angle required that Star work closely with Paidy’s team to combine all necessary skills – UX, Product, DevOps and QA – into one team. With this close integration, we held weekly product, engineering, QA and design meetings along with daily stand-up meetings for the project team. As a result, we defined the information architecture to reveal primary and secondary workflows and designed wireframes to validate the flow of the UX concept and further software development. 

By July 2021, our remote team proudly released the MVP. Included features accomplished two major objectives:

1. Enhanced shopping experience. Where users could customize wishlists, search result sorting and more products available.
2. Semi-automated business logic. Designed with enriched and smarter scraping and a dedicated product portal to manage Inspirations and Popular Products.

Even with a fully remote team, agile management allowed us to balance a tight timeline and reach stellar results – with cultural adaptation, speed, and FinTech innovation key to our collective success.