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Visa’s Director of Product Management on BNPL’s Future
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Visa’s Director of Product Management on BNPL’s Future

Visa’s Director of Product Management on BNPL’s Future

Fintech Nexus Staff·
Fintech
·Jul. 22, 2025·6 min read

“I truly believe that from now on, we’re going to start to see a lot of partnerships happen within financial institutions and fintechs. And with AI coming, I think the startups are better positioned to leverage AI.” 

As Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) growth slows and the industry faces regulatory scrutiny, providers must evolve to remain viable.

What should they do? Fintech Nexus spoke with Ramandeep (Raman) Aulakh, Visa’s Director of Product Management, who advises them to consider changes to their platform architecture, absorb scaling lessons from traditional fintechs, and pursue platform interoperability. Aulakh has more than a decade of experience building platforms for PayPal, Amazon, and Visa. With PayPal, he built the platform supporting its integrations with every major U.S. bank. He leads Visa’s initiatives with companies including Apple, Amazon, and Google.

How has the ecosystem overall, and specifically how you work with banks, changed?

“Prior to PayPal, I used to work at a data aggregation company, and we worked with banks. At times, the banks were very reluctant to give access to data for these companies, even though they were powering consumer experiences and getting consumer consent. 

“We’ve come a long way where banks are now open. They have APIs providing this data. They are willing to play in the ecosystem and create that level playing field so fintechs can innovate. 

I’m also seeing that banks are now very open to partnering with these innovative startups because they realize the bank’s expertise lies in compliance and funding. But one of the things I think the banks are also recognizing is that the startups understand customers a lot better. They provide a better customer experience, which is why I’m seeing this fundamental shift where traditional financial institutions are partnering with fintech companies to bring new experiences.”

Was there a tipping point when the banks started buying in and changing it from competition to collaboration, or was it more of a gradual shift?

“It took a very long time for things to shift. There was always a back and forth; sometimes the banks would agree with certain things, but they weren’t incentivized to go in that direction.

It’s going to accelerate from here, because the fintechs that have proven themselves and show real value to the banks, and that is what was required for the banks to recognize the importance of having these innovative fintechs in the industry. 

I truly believe that from now on, we’re going to start to see a lot of partnerships happen within financial institutions and fintechs. And with AI coming, I think the startups are better positioned to leverage AI. The banks are going to rely on these partners to bring the power of AI to them as well.”

From a platform architecture perspective, sum up the current state of BNPL technology.

“I believe BNPL is still in its early stage. It’s been around for a while, but the last three to four years is when it has taken off and gotten a lot of traction, both from the consumer and financial institutions. 

It’s still fragmented, where merchant BNPL adoption is hard because it’s very bespoke. Every fintech, every BNPL, works in a slightly different way, and the merchants are looking to get as much acceptance as possible, so they’re having to work through a lot of these bespoke implementations.

The way this is set up, the fintechs are trying to get as much traction as possible, so there’s a lot of growth focus. But as we look towards the evolution, the growth is going to turn into some kind of stabilizing force, where eventually the the BNPLs are going to take a pause and think about how they work at scale, and how do they work in a more responsible way where customers are not negatively impacted and the overall ecosystem is enabled in a way that there’s free flow of information. It’s very much a race to see who wins the biggest pot.

(BNPLs) are very much focused on acquiring customers, and they’re very much focused within their own house. So, they are funding those installment transactions. 

At one point, when they get to a certain level of scale, it’s going to become harder and harder, given the current economic environment, where the interest rates are so high, to give that float. The key to sustainability is to diversify revenue streams. 

Today, they are very much focused on merchants funding those transactions, but diversifying through value-added services or partnerships and providing those services to other financial institutions could unlock a lot of value. 

The other part here is that there’s going to be more and more regulations coming in, and stricter compliance requirements. Partnerships are going to be great for it, because the banks know compliance, they live in that world. Partnering with them and relying on them for their infrastructure is going to be helpful, while the BNPL offer them their consumer experience.

The BNPLs are going to become more open to outside of their own four walls, they’re going to open up their capabilities to other players. That will help them diversify revenue streams. I see a world where these BNPLs evolve from being pure lenders to data-rich commerce enablers, where they help make real-time, risk-based pricing decisions. 

For example, rather than charging merchants a standard amount, they can base it on customer risk. They can bring all that personalization from the customer and merchant standpoints. There could be personalization or some kind of flexibility that could be brought in at the given transaction. Imagine if there could be real-time funding decisioning for that transaction. Is the customer funding? Is it a brand that the merchant is selling that’s funding it? 

On the back end, there’s another lender that is willing to fund, so imagine all of that coming together in the most optimized way to run those transactions for BNPLs. That’s where I see us going, especially with agented commerce coming in, I think we’re going to see a lot of automation happen. We’re going to see a lot of cross connections happening through these agentic interfaces. It’s going to become a lot easier for BNPL and other players to open up and interconnect.”

What are some of the decisions they have to make about partnerships, or designing techs, so they can more easily absorb some of these other technologies that they’re going to need to grow?

“They will have to figure out how to expose their services and have real-time information transferred to potential lending partners. Their decisioning, risk scoring and everything has to be transparent and show the risk score assigned to this transaction in real time. They let you make the decision, but they’re going to pass that information over to you, so that connection that has to be built and opened up. 

And, ideally, they would have multiple partners in the mix, so they can optimize for themselves, which means now it has to be an open access with multiple partners coming into the picture. Imagine a marketplace behind the scenes for these lenders. 

From an acceptance standpoint, the BNPLs have been working very hard on getting the meaningful marquee merchants. They wanted to go after scale, obviously, but beyond a certain point, to get more scale and acceptance, they’ll have to be looking at other channels. 

We’re seeing that with the wallet providers that provide payment capabilities. They are getting involved with these BNPLs, or providing them as payment methods. That unlocks a massive amount of acceptance for BNPLs, but it also puts them in competition with other payment methods. It also, to some degree, takes away their competitive advantage, especially if they’re engaging customers in their own apps and making revenue from affiliate marketing. 

That part needs to evolve, where, ideally, all these bespoke integrations that are happening on the merchant side. The architecture needs to be defined, where it becomes a standard implementation, for the most part, across BNPL providers. 

That way, the seller side of the ecosystem now has a low barrier to entry. They can onboard and access any BNPL provider they want. It could be a traditional fintech BNPL provider, like Affirm or Klarna, or it could also be a BNPL provider that is a traditional issuer or a lender that wants to play in that space. 

Having that standard flow and way of integrating is what’s going to help the ecosystem.”

  • Fintech Nexus Staff
    Fintech Nexus Staff

    This piece was created by one of our content team members. Reach us at [email protected]

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Tags
Affirmagentic commerceAI in fintechAmazonBNPL regulationBNPL technologybuy now pay laterdigital payments innovationfintech partnershipsfintech scalabilityKlarnaPayPalplatform interoperabilityRamandeep AulakhVisaVisa Director of Product Management
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