The BNPL button next to it is easier to tap. It lifts conversion. And on a big-ticket basket, every customer it captures is a customer who pays you less, whose relationship you don't own, and who's gone after one transaction. Forefront helps you close the gap.
You sell things that cost real money. Furniture, jewelry, appliances, premium services, big-ticket B2B. Whatever the category, your average customer is buying something they thought about for a while before they clicked. You have your own card program for those customers (private label, co-brand, or your own), and at your own checkout that card is losing to the BNPL button sitting next to it.
You already know the card is the better product for your business. Better economics, a customer you actually own, a relationship that compounds for years instead of a single financed transaction. It loses anyway, for one reason: it can't ship fast enough to make the better product feel as easy as the worse one.
Most merchant credit teams are operating below their own ceiling. Not because they're not good. Because the levers that move checkout conversion sit across product, risk, compliance, and partner-bank operations, and no single person on the team can see all of them at once. The result is a roadmap full of items the team assumes require bank approval, sitting next to items they could ship tomorrow if someone drew the line clearly.
BNPL wins the conversion meeting. Credit wins the decade.
A five-day diagnostic of why your card is losing the click, and a prioritized roadmap of what to do about it, classified against what your partner-bank relationship actually requires.
A structured review of where and how your card appears in the customer's path (placement, surfacing, application flow, onboarding friction, mobile experience), measured against the standard the BNPL option next to it has already set.
How your card is positioned against the BNPL and installment options sharing your checkout. Where you're winning, where you're losing the click, and which of those gaps are about product and which are about presentation.
A prioritized roadmap that connects what the audit found to your actual business goals, with every recommendation classified against your partner-bank relationship: ship-this-quarter moves you can make without bank approval, items worth a routine approval cycle, and items worth a longer conversation.
Across the five days, this is the entire ask:
No standing meetings, no embedded time, no disruption to your roadmap.
A decade in consumer credit, lending, and payments, on both sides of the table. I currently lead cardmember acquisition at checkout for a program targeting 1,000+ new accounts per week at maturity. Before that, product roles on the lender side at issuers, originators, and direct-to-consumer credit programs.
I have sat on the merchant side of a partner-bank relationship and felt every roadmap decision pulled toward the bank's clock. I know which approvals are worth fighting for, which can be routed around, and which UX changes never needed sign-off in the first place. That's the vantage Forefront is built on.
Author of Autonomy Lost (2023). Writing Pay Later (2027), a cultural history of consumer borrowing.
A ~5,000-word field guide for merchants whose card program is losing the big-ticket checkout to BNPL. Built around the new PYMNTS merchant-choice data, the agentic commerce timeline, and the partner-bank dynamics most teams are operating below their ceiling on.
Autonomy Lost (2023) is on the silent crisis in product management. Pay Later (2027) is a cultural history of consumer borrowing, and an argument for what good credit at checkout should look like.
Five days. $5,000. A prioritized roadmap your team can execute against on Monday.
Email Sean →Figures cited represent industry-level findings and the author's reading of published sources. Effects at any specific merchant will vary with category, customer mix, and program design.