PayTomorrow Flexible Financing Platform Adds FlexShopper Lease-to-Own Services

FlexShopper’s lease-to-own (LTO) services are now available in PayTomorrow’s flexible financing platform.

This collaboration enables retail merchants to offer more consumer financing options to their customers, the companies said in a Monday (Aug. 19) press release.

“Our combined strengths will empower merchants to cater to a broader customer base, from prime to nonprime consumers, fostering increased sales and customer satisfaction,” Tony Amitrano, chief revenue officer of PayTomorrow, said in the release.

PayTomorrow’s flexible financing platform lets consumers access financing options directly through merchant channels and streamlines the checkout process, according to the release.

The integration of FlexShopper’s LTO services includes both current and future financing options available from that provider and provides more choices for underserved consumers and retail merchants, the release said.

The first retailer to deploy this new combined offering is Monro, an automotive service and tire provider with about 1,300 locations across the United States, per the release.

“Initial customer origination totals from these locations are exceeding our expectations, with almost 1,300 new partner locations enabled with FlexShopper LTO offerings,” Russ Heiser, CEO at FlexShopper, said in the release. “Based on the success of our initial rollout, our partnership with PayTomorrow has already added over 100 incremental locations with additional retailers and we are now serving over 1,400 retail locations through our partnership with PayTomorrow.”

More than one-quarter of U.S. consumers would not purchase durable goods at a traditional retailer that does not offer lease-to-own options, according to “The Lease-to-Own Secret: Giving Consumers Control Over Durable Goods Purchases,” a PYMNTS Intelligence and Katapult collaboration.

The report found that when shopping at a retailer that lacked this option, 16% of U.S. consumers would not make the purchase, while 10% would go to a lease-to-own store and attempt to use lease-to-own financing.

Lease-to-own offers a lifeline to consumers with thin or no credit, Orlando Zayas, CEO of Katapult, told PYMNTS in an interview posted in April 2022.

“Retailers are awakening to the possibilities,” Zayas said. Companies that were not interested in knowing more about LTO began considering it and adding it to their payment stacks, in part because so many companies have done the technical heavy lifting of upgrading their payment and checkout capabilities.