@ASXnewbie08 my opinion is that management have run the transition to BNPL very much like a startup attempting to find product/market fit. In a tech startup, product/market fit is an early stage process in which a company releases a product in an attempt to find strong demand. An early release product generally doesn't have all desired features and usually has only the key features of the product in order to adequately test demand. Once demand has been found, the product is redeveloped at a higher standard and more features are added.
This is one of the key concepts in the book the Lean Startup. Generally the company won't have the best developers but rather they'll have more generalists (people that are decent at a lot of things but don't specialize in any one thing e.g. Java). This keeps staffing costs low while the product is being trialed for demand.
There's really great stories about the beginning of Uber or the beginning of AirBnB for example where these businesses were completely new models and they actually didn't know what they were doing because they didn't have a model to copy from when building the business. In situations where the business model is unknown, the product/market fit is an important phase. Uber for example was a limo on demand type service. The demand for a limo is not great so the model was revised to be closer to a taxi service. Demand was higher and product market fit was found. AirBnB was about renting a couch rather than an entire house or a room. The demand was apparent but getting the supply side of the market was difficult because how do you get people to trust complete strangers to rent a room? They solved the problem by writing a script to crawl Craigslist. Product/market fit was found.
The reason I share these two examples is because both of these business models didn't exist so the product market fit phase was rather important. You have to walk before you can run. IOU however tapped into a known business model. I believe more money could have been spent on hiring skilled developers to make a more polished first version. Not to be too critical of course because BNPL has been a business model that has been largely unprofitable. The way the company proceeded with a lean startup approach has found demand with quality customers and merchants while keeping costs low.
What I do think has happened though is that the market has perceived IOU as being more capable of doing things at a faster pace than what it has. Most investors have come from watching Z1P and APT at the top of their game, bringing in lots of revenue while spending a lot of money to make things happen.
I think management have the expertise to pull this off however I think it's going to take longer than most are expecting and that creates a headwind for the share price because expectations have been running high. All in my opinion of course.
IOU Price at posting:
19.5¢ Sentiment: Buy Disclosure: Held
(20min delay)