A leading academic is calling for tougher regulations over buy-now pay later operators who at the moment are able to fly under the radar of most consumer credit protections.
Saurav Dutta is head of the school of accounting at Curtin University. He notes most consumers who use services of this kind are probably short of cash or living pay cheque to pay cheque. That tends to be millennials in their 20s or 30s making discretionary purchases that are not matched by the income they're generating.
Research by the Consumer Payments Research Centre bears this out. It has found 70 per cent of young Australians are now concerned about their financial wellbeing.
“Young people are optimistic about their future and engage in buy-now pay-later schemes because they think they will have more resources later in life to pay off their debt rather than waiting to have sufficient money to make the purchases,” says Dutta.
“That sort of thinking generally…