What happened: The British bank HSBC announced it had entered the POS financing market (Finextra). The offering is dubbed Flexipay, and it is available to consumers regardless of whether they bank with HSBC. The first merchant to integrate Flexipay is Ovo Energy, which enables customers to purchase solar panels in instalments. According to Ovo, the high upfront costs were a big challenge for many consumers.
My comment: Financing solutions for solar panels have been a hot topic for some time. In this newsletter, I covered Enpal's move into financial services and interviewed Cloover’s CEO on my podcast. I assume that all of us agree that financing products for solar panels is necessary and should be embedded into the customer journey. But how embedded do they need to be, and is the brand of a traditional bank required? Most of the existing embedded solutions are powered by innovative providers without the brand of traditional banks. Therefore, the HSBC offering is different. However, the products have many differences, so we should not compare apples with pears. But it will be interesting to see if product offerings with a traditional bank involved receive greater traction (OVO Energy seems to expect this).
