The Ownership Question: Why BNPL’s Evolution From Credit Cards May Be More Complex Than It Looks

The Ownership Question: Why BNPL's Evolution From Credit Cards May Be More Complex Than It Looks

Fintech strategist Alex Johnson is challenging one of the industry's favorite mental models—the neat progression from physical products to digital subscriptions—and the implications matter for how CFOs think about emerging payment structures.

In an analysis published this week, Johnson outlined the conventional wisdom that has shaped financial services digitization for two decades: products move from physical to digital, stores become apps, and ownership eventually gives way to streaming access. It's the same arc that took music from Tower Records CDs to Spotify subscriptions, and it's been applied liberally to explain everything from digital banking to buy-now-pay-later services.

The model works like this: a physical product sold in a physical store (a credit card from a bank branch) becomes a physical product sold digitally (online card applications), then a digital product sold digitally (virtual cards and instant issuance), and finally a subscription service where the notion of a "store" fades entirely. Using this framework, BNPL represents the natural evolution of credit cards—streaming credit where consumers access unsecured loans on-demand rather than through traditional channels.

"At a 30,000 foot level," Johnson wrote, the progression feels inevitable. Some industries may be ahead and others (cough banking cough) behind, but everyone appears headed in the same direction.

Except Johnson argues this tidy model leaves out critical concepts. "The trouble with this model is that it leaves out a couple very important concepts," he noted, before identifying the first: "not all products can or should be digitized."

The observation arrives as finance leaders grapple with which emerging payment models deserve capital allocation and which represent overhyped category confusion. If BNPL is genuinely the streaming-credit successor to traditional cards, that suggests one set of competitive dynamics and margin structures. If it's something else entirely—a different product serving different needs—the strategic calculus changes.

Johnson's critique matters because the "everything becomes streaming" model has driven significant fintech investment and product development decisions. It's been used to justify why traditional credit products should fear disruption, why embedded finance represents an existential threat to incumbent banks, and why subscription-based financial services represent the future.

But the framework's elegance may be its weakness. By forcing every financial product into the same evolutionary boxes, it risks obscuring what makes different products actually work—and what consumers are truly buying when they choose one payment method over another.

The question of ownership versus access has become central to new business models across financial services. Whether consumers want to "own" credit capacity through a card or "stream" it through point-of-sale financing may depend on factors the linear digitization model doesn't capture: the nature of the purchase, the consumer's credit profile, the merchant relationship, and the actual economics of the transaction.

For CFOs evaluating partnerships with BNPL providers or considering whether to build embedded finance capabilities, Johnson's skepticism suggests a harder question than "where are we on the digitization curve?" The real question may be whether the curve itself is the right way to think about it at all.