Better Buy: Synchrony Financial vs. Affirm Holdings
There's no denying the buy now, pay later (BNPL) movement has been embraced by a wide swath of the Western world. Roughly half of all U.S. consumers say they've used the store-supplied installment loan option at least once, according to data from C+R Research and Credit Karma. Indeed, many of these people have utilized a BNPL loan more than once, with furniture, electronics, and apparel among the most common purchases for this crowd of borrowers.
The creation of this form of lending has proven a boon for Affirm Holdings (NASDAQ: AFRM), which is not only one of the industry's leading names, but has largely modeled what the industry would become after launching back in 2013.
As the idea establishes itself, though, its flaws are starting to surface. It's arguable that the micro-purchase lending industry could swing back in favor of what was working well enough before BNPL mania took hold. That's good news for Synchrony Financial (NYSE: SYF), which supported this sort of consumerism quite nicely.
Source Fool.com
