RELM.

From 15 July 2026, Buy Now Pay Later stops being the unregulated wild west of consumer credit. Lenders such as Klarna and Clearpay must now run affordability checks, offer Section 75 protection, and give customers a route to the Financial Ombudsman Service (Financial Conduct Authority, 2026). It is a significant moment for consumer protection — but it is also a quiet admission that an entire generation has been making credit decisions with tools nobody taught them to use.

The numbers explain the urgency. BNPL transaction value grew from roughly £1.2 billion in 2019 to £13.8 billion in 2024 (Oyebowale & Algarhi, 2026), and usage is concentrated among younger, less creditworthy users in more deprived areas. StepChange’s research found BNPL users are twice as likely as other credit users to borrow for essential bills, and that BNPL use is now as common as overdraft use among UK adults (StepChange, n.d.). Regulation will help, but it treats the symptom. The disposition to reach for split payments at the checkout — favouring an instant reward over a deferred cost — is precisely the kind of decision point Relm’s 4M Framework was built to diagnose.

4M asks not just what someone knows about credit, but what Mindset they bring to the Moment of purchase, and whether that Moment has been shaped, over time, into a Movement — a repeated, normalised behaviour. BNPL is a Moment-design problem as much as a knowledge problem: frictionless checkout flows are engineered to short-circuit deliberation. A financial education curriculum that only teaches “what is APR” without addressing the behavioural architecture of the Moment will leave pupils equipped with facts and short on defences.

This is also a Systems story under the Behavioural Drivers Model (4Ss): regulation changes the structural environment, but Self and Skills still determine whether a 16-year-old recognises a deferred payment plan as debt at all. As the 2028 curriculum reform brings financial education into compulsory Citizenship teaching, BNPL is the case study writing itself in real time — proof that diagnostic frameworks like 4M need to sit alongside content knowledge, not be replaced by it.

Bibliography

Financial Conduct Authority. (2026, February 11). New protections confirmed for Buy Now Pay Later borrowers [Press release]. https://www.fca.org.uk/news/press-releases/new-protections-confirmed-buy-now-pay-later-borrowers

Oyebowale, A. Y., & Algarhi, A. S. (2026, January 27). Buy-now-pay-later rules in the UK will change in 2026, but will they offer protection or exclusion? The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/buy-now-pay-later-rules-in-the-uk-will-change-in-2026-but-will-they-offer-protection-or-exclusion-263763

StepChange. (n.d.). Buy Now Pay Later under regulation: July 2026. https://www.stepchange.org/media-centre/press-releases/buy-now-pay-later-regulation-marks-step-forward.aspx