Point-of-sale (POS) lender Paylate has bought the fast-growing business in order to build a single platform for installment loans that covers both offline retail and e-commerce.

POS finance is one of the fastest-growing areas of the fintech industry with Klarna, Affirm and GreenSky having an aggregate valuation of $8.7bn. Paylate's focus has until now been on providing e-commerce installment loans. With the purchase of AmmoPay it moves into one of the most conservative areas of lending - offline retail installment loans - and will be able to offer retail partners an omnichannel installment loan service. Almost all AmmoPay partners have already switched to a new unified technology platform.

With the acquisition of AmmoPay, Paylate plans to increase its customer base to 1 million users by 2020 with its aggregate portfolio of financed installments amounting to more than $149m. This will largely be achieved via cross-selling (65% of AmmoPay retail partners are already selling via their own e-commerce sites), by combining the customer base and using a number of innovative brokerage technologies.

“Paylate has historically worked with the largest online retailers and it is now time to introduce our products to offline. The infrastructure and experience gained by AmmoPay will provide Paylate with an excellent base for leadership in the non-bank POS lending segment in 2019,” comments Pavel Ivanov, Executive Director at Paylate.

“While AmmoPay is already delivering impressive results, we’re unable to give it the attention it deserves as we now shift our focus from Russian to the Latin American market. We are confident that Paylate's experience and the synergistic effect of this merger of companies will ensure the AmmoPay project reaches its maximum potential,” comments Boris Batine, co-founder and CEO at ID Finance.

Paylate launched in 2013 and now has more than 700 e-commerce partners including industry leaders such as Aeroflot and Yandex.Money. It is enjoying high sales growth, operating a high value loan book with loans of up to USD 3,700 and an average value above USD 700.

AmmoPay has been operating in the POS finance market since 2015. In 2018, the volume of financed purchases in installments amounted to more than USD7.5m - more than three times the value of the previous year. The company has more than 50 partners and 2,000 sales outlets, including Detsky Mir (MOEX: DSKY) owned by Sistema PJSFC (“Sistema”) (LSE: SSA) and others. The company's customer base has over 75,000 users.