Fintech Innovation and Changing Consumer Finance

Rent Now, Pay Later

The housing shortage in the US is creating new markets for BNPL players, who have started to offer ‘rent now, pay later’ loans that spread the cost of renting into several payments across a month. “Wemimo Abbey, co-founder of Esusu, said the loans serve a growing number of people who work freelance or gig economy jobs with irregular pay schedules. ‘People can make rent payments, it’s just the timing,’ he said.  ‘Recent inflation has been really sticky, but incomes are not going up,’ Abbey added. ‘So that’s what makes us think this is going to be a massive, massive market’.” Affirm and Flex are among Esusu’s competitors.

The lenders say that they are offering services to an otherwise underserved population, many of whom live pay cheque to pay cheque and have less than three weeks of emergency savings if they lost their jobs. Flex vice-president of public affairs, Ryan Metcalf, said that the alternatives for its customers are more expensive, such as subprime credit cards, payday lenders and late fees. Split Pay CEO Andrew Borovsky said that the business hopes to start offering credit cards with lower interest rates to customers based on their ability to pay their rent. “In an ideal world my product gets used less, frankly,” said Borovsky.

Thndr rocks retail investing in Egypt

Fintechs are prominent on the FT’s list of the 100 Fastest Growing Companies in Africa, and top of that list is Egyptian retail trading app Thndr. Ahmad Hammoud was a young investment banker in Cairo in 2016 when he approached his bosses with an idea for a retail trading app similar to Robinhood. When they didn’t go for the idea, he decided to do it himself, launching Thndr in 2020 with co-founder Seif Amr. “The app has been downloaded more than 5.5mn times, according to company figures, while the number of users who have ‘funded their accounts’ has climbed to 700,000 this year, up from 500,000 in 2025,” the FT reports. “The company’s growth has been ‘humbling’, says Hammouda, describing the extent to which Egyptians have embraced digital investment as something he had not expected ‘in his wildest dreams’.

The average age of the customer base is 30 to 32 years old and 80 per cent are first-time investors, he adds. About half come from outside the major urban centres of Cairo and Alexandria and 12 per cent are women.” Hammouda says the 2023 financial crisis in Egypt was pivotal as people turned to the app in search of better returns than they were getting from their savings accounts after the central bank devalued the Egyptian pound and inflation soared.   “Fostering financial literacy is a key aim, says Hammouda who described Thndr as a ‘code and content’ company, which does not just deploy technology but also uses social media channels and influencers to demystify stock trading and explain its products. ‘Creatives are as critical to us as engineers. We do a lot of collaborations with influencers, educating people,’ he explains.” Thndr’s sister company is the app Rumble, which offers subscription-based financial advice.

The magic of money manifests in a magic wand

Queueing to get through the turnstiles on the London Tube many years ago, Lafferty Daily Briefing watched in amusement as a woman tapped what looked like a magic wand on the contactless payment pad and the gates sprang open. (She had cut the payment chip out of a plastic card and pasted it into a plastic star on the end of a stick.) Turns out she was way ahead of her time. In the US, Cash App is launching a “magic wand”, inspired by – what else – a TikTok trend where people make their own wands with embedded contactless cards. “The wand is the first edition of a new form factor, Cash APP tags – NFC-enabled, physical payment accessories that let customers pay without having to reach for their phone or card,” reports Finextra. “While contactless payment wearables such as rings have long been available, with limited take-up, Block unit Cash App is hoping that its wand will tap into the way ‘Gen Z expresses their style and identity’. ‘While digital wallets are invisible and physical cards are often buried in wallets, Cash App Tags are just the opposite,’ said Thomas Templeton, hardware lead at Block. “We see a unique opportunity here to make payments visible and social for the first time.” Wizards and witches have yet to comment.