Finfi Adds ‘Save Now, Buy Later’ to Financial Wellness Platform

Finfi has added a “save now, buy later” product to its financial wellness platform.

With this new purchase-linked savings plan, users can save money in their own Reserve Bank of India (RBI)-regulated account and then receive a discount on a product when they have accumulated enough money to purchase it, Finfi said in a Wednesday (Jan. 4) press release.

The company said in the release that this is a practice commonly used by jewelers in India, and that Finfi is now expanding the concept to more than 50 product categories and brands.

“Our main focus is on developing a payroll-based [application programming interface (API)] infrastructure, but creating experiences that can be supported through that infrastructure help prove the value of the infrastructure to all stakeholders,” Finfi Co-founder Pranav Barthwal said in the release. “This is why we are building the experiences and infrastructure together.”

The new “save now, buy later” product joins Finfi’s platform that leverages paychecks through APIs and provides an earned wage access (EWA) product, according to the release.

With this employer-sponsored EWA product, employees can access short-term liquidity solutions that use the wages that they have earned but would otherwise not receive until payday at the end of the month, the release said.

It also enables employers to offer an employee benefit that provides a better alternative to options like employee advances, informal borrowing, credit card debt or digital borrowing — while adhering to the compliances and legal processes that are associated with payroll processing, per the release.

“Open, restful APIs, around payroll, require support from several stakeholders,” Finfi Chief Technology Officer and Co-founder Virendra Kumar said in the release. “Experiences that we are creating through payroll data propels the whole ecosystem forward and creates the required urgency for people to prioritize.”

PYMNTS research has found that the demand for earned wage access is growing in the United States too.

With 72% of Americans living paycheck to paycheck, a growing number of employees and workers want access to their wages before payday, according to the “Money Mobility Tracker®,” a PYMNTS and Ingo Money collaboration.

To meet this demand, more employers are turning to EWA to allow workers to access wages as they are earned instead of receiving a lump sum each payday.

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