Buyline wants to make sure small retailers can compete
Hugh Phillips, Buyline chief executive takes a personal experience to illustrate his view on retail finance. ‘I went to one of the big carpet retailers on the retail park near me. There were two members of staff serving on a Saturday afternoon, and I waited 20 minutes to be served, got pointed to a display and told to choose what I wanted. It
wasn’t a great experience and I didn’t buy. A few days later, my wife suggested we try
the store that I’ve driven past 30 times in the last month and hadn’t even considered. We popped in there, we had a really good conversation, were really, really happy with the service that we got. They didn’t offer finance whatsoever.
‘But we’re now talking to the owner about offering finance, because he said: “The
number of times customers ask me for finance and I say to them, Oh, I can’t afford to offer finance. No finance company will touch me because I’m too small.” Well, we will.
We will allow him to offer finance. And on the fact that he’s saying he couldn’t afford to offer finance, he was amazed to find out what it cost.
‘Yes, it does eat a little bit into the margin. But if it’s driving your sales, if it’s doing the right thing and driving your business, it should be used more as a marketing tool than
a margin erosion problem. We see the ability to give smaller retailers the power to compete with the big boys, because let’s face it, we know they beat them on service. They make a far better cup of tea than you’ll ever get from the retail parks. Small businesses have to be able to compete on all levels, and what we try and do is make sure that they have the right products to compete.’
And it’s a topic Phillips knows well, having worked in retail finance for 17 years. Before that he spent two decades as a retailer. ‘I was a retail manager, a retail area manager. So, I’m one of the few people you’ll meet in this industry who used to be the person
that filled out the forms, explaining the benefit of consumer finance. Whether it is filling out forms as a retailer, underwriting applications at Barclays, introducing ecommerce
at Klarna, I’ve pretty much seen the industry at all different levels. So it’s an industry I
feel quite passionate about.
‘We can onboard a business partner that doesn’t have any level of regulation at all. We will give them full training in order to offer our product. They get full access to our online training suite in order to train all their staff. We can give them the correct posters for their front windows to advertise the product. They don’t need to be regulated. Being regulated allows them to offer longer term finance – you can only offer up to 11 months if you’re
not regulated. Or if you want to offer interest-bearing finance, you have to be regulated.
‘Over the next couple of months we’ll be educating all our business partners that have been offering unregulated credit on what the FCA’s changes will be in July, to make sure they are ready.’
