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BNPL and Flexible Installments

Overview of BNPL installment plans

Note: You must create a purchase credit plan before creating an installment credit plan.

Highnote's BNPL installment credit plans let you offer your account holders the ability to spread their payments on a transaction over a set number of installments. They are post-purchase Buy Now, Pay Later offerings that convert a cleared transaction from a regular revolving credit plan into a fixed installment plan.

As such, Highnote installment credit plans are attached to an existing credit card product and require that you first create a standard PURCHASE credit plan before creating an INSTALLMENT credit plan.

To begin offering BNPL installment payment plans on your card product,

  1. Create and and activate a purchase credit plan.
  2. Create and activate an installment credit plan with a fee schedule.
  3. Per eligible and cleared transaction, create and activate an installment agreement.

View installment credit plan templates

Use the following query to view credit plan templates available for your card product. This query includes an optional filter by balanceType of INSTALLMENT.

Create installment credit plan

Once created, you cannot modify a credit plan. This prevents an unauthorized change in terms from occurring on any financial accounts.

From a credit plan template, you can create an installment credit plan and define the minimum and maximum transaction purchase amount allowed on the plan. The allowed transaction amount must fall within the minimum and maximum range defined on the template.

Installment fees are based on a percentage of the transaction purchase amount, or a fixed amount. Optionally, you can attach an installment fee schedule when creating the installment plan, by either

a. providing it as an input to this mutation when creating the plan, or b. attaching it after the plan is created as shown in Attach fee schedule to installment credit plan.

Use the following mutation in your test environment to create an installment credit plan:

Create fee schedule for installment credit plan

You can create fees for installment credit plans and assess a percentage of the cleared transaction amount. If you have multiple installment credit plans, they can share the same fee schedule or have different fee schedules.

For more information on creating fees, see the Fees guide.

The Highnote team will configure and activate fee schedules in your live environment, but you can simulate creating fee schedules in your test environment using the following mutation:

Attach fee schedule to installment credit plan

You can attach the fee schedule to the credit plan if you didn’t attach a fee schedule when creating the credit plan. Only installment credit plans can have an attached fee schedule with a feeActivityType set to INSTALLMENT_FEE.

Activate installment credit plan

Use the following mutation to activate an installment credit plan in your test environment:

View card product installment credit plans

View a paginated list of active and inactive installment credit plans on your card product using the following query:

Overview of BNPL installment agreements

After creating an installment plan, you can begin creating installment agreements per transaction. Installment plans can only be offered on cleared transactions. And you must activate the installment agreement to apply the plan’s payment terms on the transaction.

View installment eligibility for transaction events

You can look up whether a group of transaction events is eligible for installments without our system actually calculating the potential offers.

View installment offers by transaction

You can view which installment credit plans qualify for a given transaction. The credit plans will provide details on the payment amount, fees, and total cost based on the plan’s settings and transaction amount.

Installment plans can only be offered on cleared transactions and the purchase amount must be within the min and max range defined on the credit plan.

Use the following query to lookup qualifying installment credit plans offers with a cleared transaction event ID.

Activate installment agreement for transaction

Once you or your account holder has selected an installment plan, you can activate an agreement to apply the installment plan payment terms on the transaction.

Use the following mutation to create an installment agreement for a cleared transaction event:

View installment agreement by financial account

You can view a paginated list of installment agreements related to a financial account using the following query:

View installment agreement

Use the following query to view an installment agreement. The snapshot field includes a rollup of payments made and remaining, broken out by principal and fees.

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