Letter to readers: Bye, credit cards; hello, ‘buy now, pay later’?

Dear readers,

We receive tons of story ideas, often from people like you. While many of them are interesting, we have to pick and choose which ones to pursue. Our team isn’t that large, after all.

The reality is that many topics do not get the treatment they deserve. From our perspective, we place bets on stories that we think are most likely to resonate with our audience – based on internal data and common sense.

Sometimes, we gamble. One decision that paid off for us was this story on why the time is ripe for “buy now, pay later” in Asia. It’s certainly an exciting development to watch, though it’ll likely need to get to a much larger scale than it is now in order to make sense.

Sephora Singapore is offering a buy-now-pay-later option in partnership with Atome / Photo credit: Sephora

A reader first pitched this story to me months ago, but we didn’t pick it up at the time. Then our Singapore reporter Melissa Goh pitched it to me more recently, and I thought, okay, let’s give this a shot.

It turns out that our readers liked the story, so you can certainly expect us to produce a couple more articles on the topic soon.

One of the things we plan to do this year is expand our team, which will help us tackle more of the ideas that land on our desk.

But more than that, we’ll be able to improve the quality of each article. And that’s something I’m sure you won’t mind.

Do check out the rest of the premium stories that were released recently:

• Online grocery wars: Grab challenges Lazada for dominance
• The key logistics players and enablers of Indonesia’s ecommerce industry
• Gojek cleans up balance sheet ahead of possible M&A or public listing
• Kopi Kenangan saw explosive growth in 2019 – and stayed profitable

I’ll see you next week!

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Regards,