BillEase

BillEase is a Philippine buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) service operated by First Digital Finance Corporation, founded in 2017 by three former McKinsey & Company consultants — Georg Steiger, Hannes Wessels, and Ritche Weekun — to bring installment-based credit to Filipino online shoppers who often lack a credit card. The company launched with e-commerce marketplace Lazada as its first merchant partner and has since expanded its merchant network to more than 500 partners, spanning consumer electronics retailers like Kimstore through to travel purchases with Philippine Airlines.

BillEase’s core product lets a shopper split an online purchase into either interest-free or interest-bearing installments, approved through the company’s own underwriting rather than a traditional bank credit check — a model aimed squarely at the large share of Filipino consumers who are creditworthy in practice but excluded from formal credit products. The company raised an $11 million Series B round led by BurdaPrincipal Investments, bringing its total disclosed equity funding to roughly $15 million, which it has said it would use for customer acquisition, new product development, and hiring.

BillEase has also pushed into regulated banking: it infused ₱500 million (roughly $9 million) of fresh capital into its banking arm, the Rural Bank of Sta. Maria in Ilocos Sur, to upgrade the bank’s core systems and strengthen its capital and governance — a move toward operating BNPL lending through a licensed banking entity rather than purely as a standalone finance company.

Most Filipino online shoppers do not own a credit card, which historically locked them out of the installment-payment options many e-commerce shoppers elsewhere take for granted, forcing either full upfront payment or reliance on informal credit.

Filipino online shoppers, particularly those without a credit card, who want to spread the cost of an e-commerce or travel purchase over several installments.

BillEase built its own underwriting and merchant-integration technology rather than relying on a bank partner's existing credit infrastructure, letting it approve or decline BNPL applications in real time at checkout across a large, diverse merchant network, and it has taken the additional step of acquiring a rural bank to bring part of its lending under a formal banking license.