Buy-now-pay-later had record Cyber Monday, but that was just gravy for Minneapolis-based Sezzle

Here is what Youakim said, edited for length and clarity, about the company’s approach to growth and the holiday shopping season.

It was a good holiday season. Fourth quarter is always our biggest quarter, in terms of volume.

[But] this is a dynamic that people don’t understand about our business: If a customer fails to make a payment to us, we don’t allow them to make another purchase, and that’s completely opposite of a credit card, in my mind.

There’s a totally different approach to the holiday season between Sezzle, buy-now-pay-later and credit cards. We want to stop people from overspending. We want, of course, to help you in your holiday season, but we’re also actively trying to stop you from overspending. We might pull back limits in some cases. If a customer overspends too much and then fails to pay us, there’s always a percentage chance that some of those customers don’t want to pay us back at all ever. And we lose a customer.

Some of it’s a little bit inherent in the product. Because the product itself, even though it’s short term and smaller dollar, it’s high frequency, and if the consumer fails to make a payment, they can’t make another purchase. So we tend to be top of their repayment stack because they don’t want to lose the utility of the product. We do a little bit of pullback [of credit limits] in the holidays, which plays into that, as well.

Those new products — Premium, Anywhere, On Demand — those are all fast-rising products that are built to capture more demand. We already know Premium and Anywhere are there. On Demand, we’re learning about — is it the next killer product for us? And the more of these products where you kind of hit the nail on the head for customer demand, the more likely you gain market share.