Meet the fintech looking to become a tech unicorn that has just moved from London to Sheffield

James Jackson, founder of Bumper, told The Yorkshire Post: “We’re a payment platform for car dealerships. We effectively digitise the payments for car repairs. If you drop your car off at the dealer, you can use a variety of different payment methods through us.

“For example, you might get sent the invoice with an itemised list of all the repair works and then as part of that text or email you can either choose to spread the cost interest free, similar to other buy-now pay-later providers, or you could just pay the full amount.”

The reasons for the move to Sheffield are that the city has two great universities, there’s a lot of talent there and that it’s “much more cost effective than London”.

Mr Jackson is also originally from Wetherby, he moved to London around 15 years ago, and was keen to return to Yorkshire.

He said: “We’re super excited to be moving to Sheffield. We’ve had a small office in Sheffield for about a year now. We’re really enjoying it and looking to continue to scale that.”

Previously Bumper had around 12 people in the city but it is now shifting its headquarters from Hammersmith in London to South Yorkshire. It will maintain eight desks in the capital.

In total the business, which was founded in 2015, currently has 64 employees. Mr Jackson believes that the figure to be at 120 this time next year.

Bumper has taken an entire floor at an office building opposite Bramall Lane and expects to move in two weeks’ time.

The business has adopted a hybrid working pattern for most of its staff but customer support roles are predominantly office based.

Mr Jackson said: “When people spread the cost interest free, we’re effectively lending them that money and they have to pay us back.

“We have a collections team and a customer support team. It’s telephone based and we want to be a responsible lender, we want to be supporting our customers as much as we can.

“It’s very important that those roles are in the office.

“It’s quite hard to train and support people on the telephones if they’re all working remotely.”

Bumper, like other buy now pay later businesses, isn’t currently regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) but that could change soon.

Mr Jackson said: “We’ve had the Woolard Review and as part of this whole process we will be regulated but we’re still waiting for the final guidance on that.

“At the moment it’s technically an unregulated product because it’s completely interest free, there’s no hidden costs to the customer.”

High profile buy now pay later lenders have been in the headlines with concerns over young people being encouraged to spend beyond their means.

Bumper welcomes regulation of the sector as it feels it already has a lot of the safeguards in place and its target audience is different to other lenders.

Mr Jackson said: “It’s something that we really welcome. We’re very unique in the buy now pay later sector.

“We’ve always credit checked our customers, we’ve always done affordability checks and we’ve always shared the information with credit reference agencies.

“Pretty much everything that was recommended in the Woolard Review, we’ve been doing since 2015.

“It levels up the playing field because there was big cost associated with all of these additional checks we did and our competitors weren’t doing it. For us it’s really welcome news.”

Consumer finance set to be under pressure

Consumer finance is going to be under pressure, James Jackson says, with the cost of living crisis impacting a lot of people.

He added: “Every lender, whether that is mortgage providers, credit cards, personal loans, any type of lending, there’s going to be challenges in this type of environment.”

While other buy now pay later businesses have come under criticism for “encouraging irresponsible behaviour”, Mr Jackson says Bumper is different. He said: “It’s a one-off unexpected purchase so our growth is never going to be at the levels of Klarna but we think it’s more sustainable because it’s for people who need it and it’s a one-off transaction.”