Scalapay puts instalments into AliExpress checkouts in Italy, France, Spain and Portugal

Scalapay has partnered with AliExpress to offer buy-now-pay-later at its checkouts in Italy, France, Spain and Portugal, letting shoppers split a purchase into three or four instalments. No volumes or commercial terms were disclosed. The deal follows Scalapay's February 2026 arrangement with PPRO to widen its BNPL distribution across southern Europe, and extends the Italian provider's reach from domestic merchants to a cross-border marketplace.

Southern European BNPL has so far been a domestic-merchant business, and a global marketplace is the one channel that can put a local instalment brand in front of millions of checkouts at once. For acquirers and PSPs in those four markets it means an alternative payment method they will be asked to support, and for Klarna and Scalapay's other competitors it is distribution they did not win.

The same deal also raises the question other marketplaces will now be asked: whether consumer-credit distribution at this scale sits comfortably inside the EU's new consumer credit rules.

Whether AliExpress extends Scalapay to more European markets or adds a second BNPL provider alongside it, and how instalment credit on marketplaces is treated as the revised Consumer Credit Directive is transposed.

• thepaypers.com