The Impact of Use Now, Pay Later on the Structure of Consumer Debt: Reshaping and Challenges

DOI

10.2991/978-94-6463-811-0_112How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Buy Now; Pay Later (BNPL); Consumer Debt Structure; FinTech

Abstract

In today’s digital consumption era, the “buy now pay later” (BNPL) service, as an emerging consumer finance model, is integrating into people’s daily lives at an unprecedented speed. This study focuses on BNPL services and thoroughly and comprehensively explores their profound impact on consumer debt structure, with a particular emphasis on analyzing the various challenges that arise during the debt structure adjustment process. The study used a combination of literature review and empirical analysis to carefully examine the impact of BNPL from multiple dimensions such as debt composition, distribution, and risk characteristics. In addition, a large-scale survey was conducted to accurately grasp the distribution of debt among different age groups, income groups, and other groups. The results show that BNPL significantly improves the accessibility of debt, benefiting young and low-income groups, and also having some applications for middle-aged groups. However, it also brings new risks such as excessive debt and credit score fluctuations.

Copyright

© 2025 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Xinyue Wang
PY  - 2025
DA  - 2025/08/14
TI  - The Impact of Use Now, Pay Later on the Structure of Consumer Debt: Reshaping and Challenges
BT  - Proceedings of the 2025 5th International Conference on Enterprise Management and Economic Development (ICEMED 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 1039
EP  - 1046
SN  - 2352-5428
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6463-811-0_112
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6463-811-0_112
ID  - Wang2025
ER  -