When Klarna rang the opening bell on the New York Stock Exchange on September 10, 2025, its shares opened at 52, a 30% jump on the 40 IPO price set the night before. The stock now trades below that $40 mark. Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) delinquency has moved from a footnote into the credit file, so the question for an investor is no longer whether the signal exists. It is what the signal is worth as a trade.

Key Takeaways

  • BNPL late payments now flow into credit files, a visibility shift covered in a previous Benzinga analysis; the Federal Reserve found 24% of BNPL users were late on a payment in 2024, up from 18% in 2023.
  • Late payments and ultimate losses are diverging: 47% of users paid late in the past year, while Affirm’s 30-plus day delinquency held flat at 2.8% year over year.
  • The read is two-sided, not a single call. Exposed originators that carry the loan (KLAR, AFRM) sit on one side; cushioned firms that monetize the data (FICO, TRU) sit on the other.

The Delinquency Signal Is Now Visible And Rising

A missed BNPL payment used to vanish into a private ledger. Not anymore. For a thin-file borrower with little traditional credit history, that shift changes the math: a late installment that once stayed invisible can now shave points off the score that prices a future car loan or apartment.

The aggregate numbers track the same direction. The Federal Reserve’s 2024 survey of household economics found 24% of BNPL users reported a late payment in 2024, up from 18% the prior year. A separate LendingTree survey from March 2026 put the figure higher, with 47% of users saying they paid late at least once in the past year, climbing from 41% in 2025 and 34% in 2024. One quarter held three or more loans at once. Stacked loans turn one missed paycheck into several delinquencies at once, and consumer-finance lender CreditNinja has argued that this pile-up is what makes the BNPL bubble look fragile under stress.

The Divergence That Defines The Trade

The gap most coverage skips is this: rising late payments have not yet become rising losses. Affirm’s loan book shows it. Its 30-plus day delinquency rate sat at 2.8% in the quarter ended March 31, 2026, flat against a year earlier, even as its allowance for credit losses reached $512 million, or 6.0% of loans held for investment, per its shareholder letter. More borrowers pay late. Few, so far, walk away. That divergence is the whole trade.

The Exposed Side: Originators Who Carry The Loan

The risk concentrates wherever the loan stays on the balance sheet. When a borrower stops paying, the originator absorbs it. Two names carry that exposure directly.

Klarna Group (KLAR)

Klarna Group (NYSE:KLAR) is a pure-play BNPL originator. It priced its initial public offering at 40 per share on September 9, 2025, valuing the company near 15.1 billion, well below the roughly 45.6 billion private valuation it carried in 2021. The stock has since traded below that 40 mark, with a 52-week range of 12.06 to 57.20 reflecting how sharply a pure BNPL lender has been repriced in a single year. The originator model puts its results in direct contact with the delinquency trend.

Affirm Holdings (AFRM)

Affirm Holdings (NASDAQ:AFRM) reported fiscal third-quarter 2026 revenue of 1.04 billion, up 33%, on gross merchandise volume (GMV) of 11.6 billion, up 35%, with a GAAP operating profit and earnings per share (EPS) of 0.30. The 2.8% delinquency rate and 512 million loss allowance cited above sit on its own balance sheet. The bear case is straightforward. Affirm’s results track the consumer credit cycle, and the same furnished data that feeds credit bureaus also documents how its own borrowers behave, a tension Benzinga has examined in the context of mortgage approvals.

The Cushioned Side: The Firms That Monetize The Data

Flip the same fact and the exposure inverts. More visible delinquency means more data to score and sell. Firms one step removed from the loan get paid for the visibility, not the default.

Fair Isaac (FICO)

Fair Isaac Corporation (NYSE:FICO) reported fiscal second-quarter 2026 revenue of 691.7 million, up 39%, with Scores segment revenue rising 60% and EPS of 11.14, up 69%, in its earnings release. More BNPL data in credit files raises the relevance of the score, not the risk on a balance sheet. FICO has already moved to fold these habits into its models, a step Benzinga covered when it announced new credit scores built to reflect BNPL borrowing.

TransUnion (TRU)

TransUnion (NYSE:TRU) reported first-quarter 2026 revenue of 1,245.7 million, up 13.7%, and adjusted diluted EPS of 1.18, up 12%, in its quarterly results. The bureau is one destination for furnished BNPL data. It sells access to the visibility. It does not carry the loan that goes bad, which separates its exposure from the originators’.

Catalysts To Watch

Each side of the trade has measurable signals worth tracking each quarter:

  • The next BNPL delinquency prints from the Federal Reserve and LendingTree, which set whether late payments keep climbing.
  • The credit-loss lines in Affirm and Klarna reports, where rising delinquency would first convert into charge-offs.
  • Score-adoption and pricing disclosures from FICO and TransUnion, the test of whether the data side monetizes the visibility.
  • The macro consumer-credit cycle, which decides whether late payments stay late or turn into defaults.

The Read From Here

The same rising-delinquency figure sits in two places at once. On an originator’s balance sheet it reads as a risk line that widens if late payments become defaults. On a data firm’s income statement it reads as a revenue input that grows as more behavior becomes visible. The visibility is now permanent. The open question is the cycle, and where each name lands depends on whether the consumer holds. That answer arrives one quarterly print at a time.

image credit: Author

Benzinga Disclaimer: This article is from an unpaid external contributor. It does not represent Benzinga’s reporting and has not been edited for content or accuracy.