In the BNPL field, approval rates and traffic growth often suggest stability. Yet true financing performance is rarely defined by a single metric. In many cases, hidden BNPL revenue leakage can limit growth without being immediately visible.
Growth Doesn’t Always Reveal the Full Picture
“We have a 90% approval rate.” It’s a sentence we’ve heard many times across the fintech industry.
It sounds reassuring.
It sounds optimized.
It sounds conclusive.
But approval rate, taken alone, is rarely sufficient to evaluate financing performance.
Because approval without context can hide something much bigger: Revenue leakage.
Merchants seeking a structured diagnostic can begin with our BNPL Performance Check to identify approval blind spots before modeling revenue impact.
Why 90% Approval May Lack Context
Approval rate is a surface metric. It does not automatically reflect financing efficiency or revenue coverage.
In practice, commonly published figures tend to highlight BNPL adoption growth in the U.S., while rejection ratios based on total applications are rarely disclosed. Public reports, including analyses from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), focus primarily on market expansion rather than merchant-level approval transparency.
1. Customer Mix Changes Over Time
As traffic grows, customer diversity increases. Credit profiles, ticket sizes, and risk distribution evolve. A setup that worked yesterday may silently underperform today.
2. High-Value Orders Carry Disproportionate Impact
If the 10% rejected segment includes higher-ticket transactions, the financial impact is amplified. Losing fewer customers does not necessarily mean losing less revenue.
3. Single-Lender Models Have Structural Limits
A single-lender model cannot scale equally across all customer types. Subprime, thin-file, or near-prime segments may be filtered out even when alternative financing options exist.
That’s where performance plateaus appear without obvious explanation.
What Is BNPL Revenue Leakage?
BNPL revenue leakage occurs when financing underperforms without triggering clear operational alerts or visible performance warnings.
It can happen when certain customer segments are consistently declined, when financing becomes less effective as ticket sizes increase, or when growth introduces new risk profiles that a single-lender model cannot effectively absorb.
On paper, approval looks strong. In practice, coverage is incomplete and incomplete coverage means missed revenue.
Introducing the BNPL Calculator
After identifying potential leakage patterns, the next logical question becomes:
What is the financial impact?
That’s why we built the BNPL Revenue Calculator.
Instead of focusing solely on approval percentages, it estimates how improved financing coverage can translate into recovered revenue and scalable growth capacity.
It allows merchants to model revenue scenarios based on structured assumptions — not guesswork.
From Diagnostic to Projection
Our BNPL Performance Check helps merchants identify friction points in their financing structure.
The BNPL Calculator goes one step further.
It quantifies what optimization could represent in revenue terms.
First diagnose.
Then quantify.
Measure What Approval Rates Don’t Show
Understanding potential BNPL revenue leakage is the first step toward measurable optimization. To evaluate whether hidden rejections are affecting your business, you can now simulate their potential financial impact.
Because in BNPL, the real question isn’t:
“Is my approval rate high?”
It’s:
“Is my financing fully optimized?”
The WeGetFinancing Editorial Team
Expert insights on BNPL, consumer financing, and retention strategies.
