Monzo and Curve are the last British startups that announced adding BNPL products to their portfolio. Goldman spent 2.2 billions for purchasing a BNPL biz, joining the likes of Apple and Amazon. The BNPL market has become an arms race similar to the grocery wars from Europe earlier this year.

Curve and Monzo both have announced they will launch BNPL products this week and Goldman just coughed up $2.2 billion to get in the same game. Reminder: earlier this year, Apple, Square, PayPal and Amazon also announced they will provide BNPL services as they acquired assets in this sense. 

I am old enough to remember the times when Klarna was synonim with BNPL. Now BNPL is becoming a feature not a product - when a market is being commoditised, the value creation shifts up or down the value chain, and this kind of features are integrated into a larger economic mechanism. All the big companies mentioned above have that mechanism they can integrate BNPL into, that is one of the reasons I think Klarna's potential is still untapped and the company is undervalued.

All in all, it looks like we're going to switch the online grocery delivery drama to the BNPL frenzy, expect more investment efforts in this direction and accordingly more coverage in the media. Except that now we have more experimented business guys tackling the opportunity rather than a bunch of VCs and management consultants going after macro data.

BNPL:
BNP is at a fraction of U.S. e-commerce. We’re looking at 3%-4% penetration. And what we’re doing is unbundling the credit card. There’s a lot of road to go before you run into anybody. 

Grocery delivery: 
E-commerce in Europe and the US averages 15-20% of total retail sales, for groceries, the share of online is 0.5% - 5% across EU markets and 3.5% in the US.

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