Two years ago, when he got tactically involved in this craze while looking for a window to float on the ASX, Fahour was touting his BNPL offering, LatitudePay, as having “reached over 500,000 customers in its first year of operation and had become in a popular alternative”. to credit cards.
LatitudePay was “taking on new customers at the rate of 50,000 a month,” he said.
Even last year, he humbly observed, “If you look at the market, there aren’t many places where you can get a highly profitable consumer disruptor that’s paying a dividend yield of around 6 percent.”
In December alone, with much fanfare, Latitude expanded its BNPL products to Southeast Asia. “In Singapore and Malaysia alone, we expect the BNPL market to grow to $3.8 billion by 2025,” Fahour said. “This is going to be seven times the Australian market.”
The wind has changed, Fahour has stayed serious, and now BNPL is almost irrelevant to Latitude. We, a disruptor? Oh no, installment financing is very different.
Tired old Ahmed has always been a racing caller, a true believer in any horse he sees at the front of the field. He’ll work with whatever’s going on, appearing somewhere in a long-lasting burst of sound and fury, and usually leaving before the music stops.
Unfortunately, at Latitude, he was unable to land his signature maneuver.
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