All use cases

Collect / Recover

BNPL repayment recovery and plan rescue

Your customer's second installment just bounced three days after the purchase — handle the next message well and you recover the payment, keep them buying, and protect the merchant who sent them.

Get aheadClose the loopNext best thingRisk triggerTime-based triggerSystem triggerSMSPushEmailChatLendingE-commerce & Retail

What it does

Buy-now-pay-later collections are unlike loan collections: the amounts are small, the schedule is short, and a missed installment is far more often a forgotten card or a payday-timing slip than real distress. Treat it like a debt-chase and you slap a late fee on a good customer, freeze their account, and lose a buyer the merchant paid to acquire — over a payment they would happily have made. The agent works each installment as it comes due across a short three- or four-payment plan: it confirms the upcoming charge, repairs the payment method when a card declines, re-collects the single installment, or restructures the remaining schedule when the customer is genuinely stretched, always stating the exact consequence — the late fee, the account hold, the pause on new purchases — in plain language. When it hears real hardship it stops collecting and routes to a human, inside consumer-credit rules and on the record.

How it works

  1. 1
    Trigger. an installment on a BNPL plan is missed, declines, or is about to fall due — a payment_failed on a scheduled installment, a days-past-due flag, or a pre-due risk signal on a card likely to bounce — surfaced from the installment ledger.
  2. 2
    Decision. the agent reads the plan, not just the missed charge: which installment of how many, the amount, the linked merchant order, the payment method's health, prior plan behavior, and any hardship or vulnerability flags. It checks contact windows, frequency caps, and disclosures against the consumer-credit policy, and a judge gates every outbound message before it sends.
  3. 3
    Action. a short message on the customer's preferred channel names the missed installment and the amount, explains the exact consequence, and offers the way out — repair the card and re-collect through a secure link to the provider's hosted payment step, settle the single installment now, or spread the remaining balance over a revised schedule. Card details never pass through the conversation.
  4. 4
    Follow-through. a recovered installment or a confirmed schedule change writes back to the installment ledger and cancels pending reminders for that cycle; kept and broken promises are tracked across the short plan; hardship language routes to a human with full context; if the payment clears on its own the loop closes silently; every contact, disclosure, and arrangement writes to the audit trail.
Example
AgentQuick heads-up on your order from last week — installment 2 of 4 (the $37 due Tuesday) didn't go through, looks like the card on file expired. There's no late fee yet if it's settled in the next two days. Want to update the card and clear it now, or shall I spread the rest over smaller amounts?
CustomerCard's fine, money's just tight until Friday. Can the rest wait?
AgentNo problem — I can move installment 2 to Friday and keep the last two on their dates, no fee for the shift. Here's a secure link to confirm the card so Friday's payment runs cleanly. Your account stays open in the meantime.

Configuration

How the agent is wired for this use case.

Triggera payment_failed event on a scheduled BNPL installment, a days-past-due flag, or a pre-due decline-risk signal, emitted by the installment ledger / BNPL platform.
Tools & actions
  • BNPL platform / installment ledger · read the plan (installment number, amount, schedule, payment method health), write back recovered installments and revised schedules.
  • Merchant order link · tie the plan to the originating purchase and merchant so the customer recognises the order and the merchant relationship is preserved.
  • Payment provider · hand off to the provider's secure hosted step to repair the card and re-collect the single installment (the agent never touches card data).
  • Plan-restructure engine · re-spread the remaining installments or apply a fee waiver within consumer-credit policy.
  • Hardship / vulnerability workflow · pause collection and route a genuine-hardship case to a human with full context.
  • CRM / audit log · record every contact, disclosure, promise, and schedule change for the regulated trail.
Autonomyreminders, payment-method repair prompts, and within-policy schedule changes run unattended under judge gating; the installment is a money-moving policy class completed only on the provider's hosted step, so no card data sits in the conversation; any genuine-hardship case, fee waiver beyond policy, or account hold reversal hands off to a human, and vulnerability detection always escalates.
Channelssms · push · email · chat
Escalationa customer who signals real hardship, a disputed installment or order, a payment method that can't be repaired before the consequence triggers, or a request outside policy hands off to a collections specialist with the full plan and merchant context.

What you need

The inputs this use case runs on. Your channels stay yours; the agent supplies the judgment.

Signals

installment-level payment events (payment_failed, days-past-due on a scheduled installment), pre-due decline-risk scores, inbound questions about a plan.

Data

plan state (installment number and count, amount, schedule), linked merchant order, payment-method health and expiry, prior plan and promise behavior, hardship and vulnerability flags, consent and contact-window preferences, customer memory.

Guardrails

consumer-credit rules encoded as policy — contact windows, frequency caps, required consequence disclosures; secure payment hand-off only, no card data in any conversation; identity confirmation before account detail; judge gating on every outbound message; hardship detection with human handoff, never a payment push; stale-outreach cancellation when an installment clears; a complete audit trail.

Metrics it moves

  • recovered-revenueup: a bounced installment is repaired and re-collected, or the plan is re-spread to a schedule the customer can keep, instead of aging into a fee, a hold, and a write-off.
  • conversion-rateup: naming the installment, the consequence, and a one-tap way out turns more missed-payment contacts into a settled installment or a kept revised plan than a generic dunning script.
  • involuntary-churndown: a good customer whose card simply expired keeps their account open and keeps buying, protecting both the BNPL relationship and the merchant who acquired them.

Related use cases

Collect / Recover

Compliant collections and promise-to-pay

the cross-industry parent this BNPL variant specializes

Collect / Recover

Lending collections and promise-to-pay

the long-cycle loan-collections sibling with different stakes and cadence

Collect / Recover

Upcoming-payment reminder and autopay rescue (lending)

the upstream layer that prevents the missed installment in the first place

See it on your own customer journey

Bring one drop-off, one churn cliff, or one silent segment. We will show you what a proactive agent with memory and judgment does with it.

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