"Buy-now, pay-later" (BNPL) companies have been lauded as an alternative to credit cards and admonished as a gateway to debt, and now, according to a new story in Bloomberg Businessweek, there's a reckoning under way.
Professor Bob Lawless, a bankruptcy expert, says the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's very creation was predicated on the need to oversee the surging, loophole-enabled popularity of innovations like BNPL loans.
“Financial regulation is a game of whack-a-mole,” Lawless says. “There’s always going to be some new device or transaction that the existing statutes don’t cover, so we need a regulatory agency to track these things, because Congress—even a functioning one—can’t keep up."
Read the full story at bloomberg.com.