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By referring to technology in my previous comment, I just realized that I was stuck in a time warp.

Coming out of it, I realize the more pertinent issue out here is that of trust. Going by the events of the past year, no one will trust crypto / DLT with even a tiny fraction of the kinda money that flows through RTGS / CHAPS every day.

To slightly paraphrase @ByrneHobart, "Sloppily-built crypto companies are hacked by criminals. Well-built crypto companies are run by criminals."

"Fronted's initial premise was to offer a 12-month loan for renters who do not have an existing deposit to buy the property of their choice."

To BUY or RENT the property...?

Assuming it's RENT. IIRC, I had to put up two months' rent as deposit for my apartment in London. IMO that's not a big sum. Even if the renter doesn't have that much money on their own, I expect them to be able to get it from their employer as salary advance.

I wonder what's the quality of loan given to people (a) who don't have a couple of thousand quid ready cash (b) who can't get that kinda money from their employer, and (c) for whom an additional GBP 50 cost of loan becomes a deal-breaker. 

Sorry mate Blockchain DLT hasn't processed GBP 1 Trillion IN ITS ENTIRE LIFETIME.

I can bet that if you try to put through the present UK RTGS TPV of GBP 1T a day on Blockchain, it will suffer lifetime outage from which it will never recover, let alone recover in six hours.

Of course, finance providers are responsible for faults in their products, but I see no fault in BNPL products.

Every ecommerce website references BNPL method of payment in one of the following ways which make it clear that it's meant to be repaid: "Pay in 5", "Pay in EMI", "Pay in Installments". Every BNPL contract I've seen clearly spells out repayment schedules.

"If you can't do the time, you shouldn't do the crime". Likewise, if you can't repay, you should not borrow. Period. That's the only point that matters. All else is diversion tactic.

Grabbing BNPL when they got it and then conveniently claiming they didn't know it was a loan when they had to repay it is height of irresponsible consumer behavior that must be curbed immediately.

Regulators have chosen wisely not to go after BNPL providers. Instead, they should go after BNPL borrowers and mete out harsh punishments if they fail to repay BNPL installments.

Lame post.

People need loan. Banks won't give them credit card or personal loan or consumer loan. Before BNPL, people went to loansharks and paid usurious interests and / or had their knees capped. 

Now people sign up for BNPL. They get free credit for a certain period unlike loanshark or any other credit product and hopefully don't have their knees capped if they delay repayment. To me, that sounds like BNPL is providing a yeoman service.

Like all other products, obviously people have to read and comply with T&Cs. It's silly to claim they didn't realize it was a loan. When they bought stuff without paying, did they think it was a gift from Store or God?  

Kudos to UK pols for doing the right thing by leaving BNPL to market forces.

BNPL must be compared with loan products that people will get from loan sharks, not credit card and other loan products that people won't get from banks. 

PS: BNPL was pioneered in USA in ca. 2004 by Bill Me Later, not Klarna in Sweden. BML got acquired by PayPal a few years later. 

I published a paper on Controlling Credit Card Fraud Through Predictive Analytics back in 2008. In the subsequent 15 years, AI has made rapid strides. Accordingly, it might be able to challenge conventional wisdom in many areas e.g. "AI models live or die by the data they are trained on." 

Today, AI models use not only the data YOU provide (first party data) but have access to huge amount of third party data sourced from e.g. Data Brokers. Accordingly, even if first party data has an error, it's conceivable that AI might be able to correct it. For example, if first party data mentions address as, say, "75 Meridian Place, Off Marsh Wall, SW17 6FF, London, UK", AI can correct the postal code to "E14 9FF". (For all I know, LLMs might be powerful enough to be able to make this correction even without third party data.) 

To the extent that AI has growing resilience to bad quality data, I see the old quip GIGO becoming obsolete in the forseeable future.  

I agree that, at the highest level, it's always about Man + Technology, whether it's AI or any other technology, but, historically, technology has always brought about a change to the nature of the "Man" required to do the job. In line with that, if AI goes mainstream in payment fraud detection and prevention, Prompt Engineers may replace Fraud Case Managers!

There's no reason why shareholders of Banks or Tech Companies (or TELCOS or UTILITIES...) should underwrite losses of careless customers who get scammed. 

Three Strike Rule To Eliminate Cybercrime.

That said, if pols can't resist the temptation of enacting populist Drunk Under Lamp Post regulation, I totally endorse Barclays' demand to bring all the other industries under the lamp post.

@Finextra, JFYI, the document that opens after clicking the link is PDF (not Chrome HTML document). 

Further bluster from regulators. During the pandemic, a lot of BAU rules were arguably bent in order to keep the lights on. When they looked the other way at the time, it's terribly lame of regs to penalize companies now.