Frasers Plus BNPL, an alternative payment method.

Frasers Group (Sports Direct, Flannels, House of Fraser) wanted buy-now-pay-later across their brands, but wired into their own Frasers Plus rewards programme. This wasn't 'plug in Klarna and move on.' It meant custom commercial logic stitched between the merchant systems, the rewards engine, and a third-party credit underwriter, on a hard deadline pinned to peak trading. I owned the integration end to end, across five or six teams that didn't report to me.

The decision that shaped everything was building bespoke rather than integrating a big BNPL provider, and it came from one read: with a Klarna or Clearpay flow the customer leaves the brand, finances elsewhere, and comes back, and for a Frasers brand that broken brand-feel is a real cost. So we partnered with a smaller, more flexible underwriter and kept the customer surface entirely ours. I ran the work as three parallel tracks, commercial, technical, and compliance, held one weekly steering to keep them in sync, and when they blocked each other I made the call rather than escalating, because hunting for a decision-maker would have cost a week each time.

The piece I'm proudest of was a soft eligibility check earlier in the journey, so by the time BNPL appeared the chance of a final-step decline was very low. Nothing kills a checkout like offering someone a payment method and then refusing it.