Synchrony Financial will provide financing for merchants using Fiserv's Clover point-of-sale system early next year, with plans to expand to buy now/pay later.
At launch, the arrangement will enable Clover merchants to offer instant private-label loans and promotional financing from Synchrony Financial at the point of purchase, the Stamford, Connecticut-based lender announced Thursday.
The move will expand the number of merchants in Synchrony’s eligible lending base, according to Florin Arghirescu, senior vice president and chief product officer at Synchrony.
“We’ll begin with revolving credit, but later next year we’ll explore expanding the service to include short-term loans, including buy now/pay later installments,” Arghirescu said in an interview.
Clover’s push into point-of-sale credit echoes one of the biggest moves so far in the booming BNPL sector, when the small-business payments processor Square announced a $29 billion deal in August to
Synchrony has relied on Fiserv for card processing for about 20 years, so the connection to Clover will build on existing integrations, using Synchrony’s application programming interfaces, Arghirescu said.
“Between our move to the cloud, investments in data, APIs and robust embedded finance tools, we’re like an 80-year-old startup,” Arghirescu said.
Clover accepts credit and debit cards, but the Sunnyvale, California-based company has not previously enabled merchants to extend credit directly to consumers, said Jeff Dickerson, head of Clover at Fiserv.
“Clover merchants that download the Synchrony app will be able to push financing offers to consumers at the point of sale where the whole experience takes just a couple of minutes,” Dickerson said.
Before or during checkout, an eligible borrower could receive a digital application on their phone by inputting their mobile phone number at a Clover payment terminal or scan a QR code with their mobile device, he said.
“As soon as customers finish entering some basic information, they’ll find out whether they qualify for a loan inside of 90 seconds,” Dickerson said.
Express Oil Change & Tire Engineers is one Clover merchant that plans to add Synchrony financing, according to Dickerson.
