Globally, the demand for alternative credit models is shaped by structural gaps in financial access.
Around 1.5 billion adults worldwide remain unbanked, while an additional 2.8 billion are underbanked, lacking access to credit cards. Together, these groups represent more than half of the world’s adult population. Nearly 44% of adults globally still rely heavily on cash for financial transactions, despite 89% smartphone penetration.
In the Middle East and Africa, the contrast is even sharper: roughly 95% of the population is either unbanked or lacks access to credit cards, while mobile phone usage remains comparatively high. This structural imbalance-strong digital access paired with limited formal credit-has created fertile ground for BNPL models.
Iran presents a distinct variation of this pattern. According to World Bank data, only about 8% of Iranians are unbanked, reflecting the country’s deep penetration of retail banking. Yet approximately 86% of adults lack access to credit cards. In practice, most citizens rely on debit cards rather than revolving credit, leaving a significant gap in consumer financing. This paradox-high banking access but minimal consumer credit-has created both opportunities and challenges for banks, fintechs, and retailers operating in the installment-credit space.
BNPL in Iran
Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) services are often framed as a consumer convenience. A flexible payment option layered on top of existing financial systems. In Iran, however, BNPL has followed a markedly different trajectory. Rather than emerging as a marginal payment feature, it has evolved into a foundational consumer credit infrastructure, reshaping consumer behavior and accelerating Iran’s digital commerce ecosystem.
Iran’s BNPL market began to take shape with the entry of SnappPay, the first company to formally introduce Buy Now, Pay Later services in Iran. Instead of positioning credit merely as a checkout feature, SnapPay invested early in building the technological, risk-assessment, and merchant infrastructure necessary to scale postpaid and installment-based purchasing across ride-hailing, food delivery, FMCG, and e-commerce, and, increasingly, physical retail and social commerce. Today, SnappPay, the largest BNPL player in Iran, accounts for approximately 10% of Iran’s online retail transactions, putting Iran at a level that places the country well ahead of many comparable markets.
For context, BNPL penetration of e-commerce remains around 1% in Turkey, 2% across much of the Middle East, and 4% in Malaysia. Iran’s position is particularly notable given that this scale has been achieved largely through the growth of a single, system-level platform rather than a fragmented ecosystem of providers.
Black Friday as a Stress Test for Credit Infrastructure
These structural dynamics became especially visible during Iran’s most recent Black Friday campaign. In a single day, more than 650,000 BNPL-based e-commerce orders were recorded, contributing to nearly one million credit transactions overall. The campaign also generated a record Gross Merchandise Value (GMV) for installment purchases, marking the largest one-day BNPL event in Iran’s retail history.
Rather than representing a short-term spike, the campaign functioned as a large-scale stress test for Iran’s credit infrastructure, demonstrating that installment-based purchasing has become a default behavior for a growing segment of consumers.
The Blurring Line Between Online and Offline Retail
Another key shift revealed by the campaign was the rapid erosion of boundaries between online and physical commerce. Alongside the surge in e-commerce orders, thousands of in-store installment purchases were processed during the same period. Consumers increasingly expect credit to be available regardless of channel-whether shopping online, in brick-and-mortar stores, or through social commerce platforms.
As Majid Hesami, SnappPay’s CEO, noted during the campaign,
“What we’re witnessing in Iran is not just a record day, but the emergence of a new standard. Credit has moved beyond being a payment tool; it has become part of the infrastructure, shaping how people decide and how they buy.”
The implication is clear: Iran’s retail future is becoming experience-driven rather than channel-driven, with BNPL acting as the connective layer enabling that transition.
Accelerating Faster Than Global Benchmarks
Internationally, mature BNPL markets such as Sweden (23%), Germany (20%), and Australia (15%) represent environments where installment payments have reached behavioral saturation, supported by companies like Klarna and Afterpay. Iran, by contrast, remains at an early stage of adoption with SnappPay as the first BNPL has started it’s Pay in 4 less than five years but with a notably steeper growth curve.
SnapPay’s annual transaction volume has grown 23-fold over the past four years, a trajectory that reflects both unmet demand and the scalability of BNPL models in markets where traditional credit cards never became mainstream.
With the expansion of installment payments into physical retail and social commerce, BNPL’s share of Iran’s total retail payments is expected to rise further-potentially reshaping consumer finance in ways that parallel, but do not replicate, Western credit-card economies.
Beyond a Campaign, Toward a New Baseline
This year’s Black Friday marked more than the conclusion of a successful sales event. It signaled the normalization of credit as an expectation, the decentralization of e-commerce growth, and the convergence of online and offline retail experiences.
For Iran’s digital economy, BNPL is no longer an experiment. It is rapidly becoming a baseline layer of consumer behavior and financial infrastructure. And if current trends continue, the country’s BNPL evolution may offer a compelling case study for other markets where access qto credit-rather than access to technology-remains the primary constraint.
What is unfolding is not merely the rise of a payment model, but the re-architecture of how a cash-oriented economy transitions into a credit-enabled digital future.
Featured image by user850788 on Freepik
