Buy-now-pay-later plans signed before regulation, assessed on what redress remains

Every piece this site has run on buy-now-pay-later regulation this summer — four of them — addresses a person standing at a checkout now. The regulator gives everyone else two sentences.

“Any DPC agreement that you have taken out before 15 July 2026 will also remain unregulated. The new protections won’t apply to these agreements.” That is the FCA’s consumer page on deferred payment credit, last updated on 6 August 2026, quoted as it stands.

The subject is somebody still repaying a plan signed in March, who has read that BNPL is regulated and drawn the obvious conclusion.

What the regulator states

Every row is the FCA’s own wording or its own date stamp. Where a row sits matters too: the Section 75 line appears under “What’s changed”, among the rules lenders follow from 15 July 2026.

The boundary is a signature, not a purchase

The cut-off attaches to when the agreement was entered into — not when the goods arrived, or when the last instalment falls due. A plan signed on 2 July 2026 and repaid into Christmas sits outside throughout.

We will not tell you which side yours is on. The page states the rule and stops; it does not address repeat or rolling arrangements, and this desk does not settle by inference what the regulator has left unwritten.

The rule that closes the route back

The position is firmer than the consumer page suggests, and the reason sits in the FCA Handbook. The Financial Ombudsman Service has two jurisdictions, and the reach-back limb — the provision written for events that happened before an activity became regulated — sits in the Voluntary Jurisdiction, which firms opt into and whose scope DISP 2.5.2G calls “wider than that of the Compulsory Jurisdiction”. DISP 2.5.3G gives the limb’s purpose: it “enables the Financial Ombudsman Scheme to cover complaints about earlier events relating to those activities before they became regulated activities.”

That limb is DISP 2.5.1R(2)(a): an activity carried on after 28 April 1988, unregulated when the act or omission occurred but regulated by the time the participant joined. Its exclusion list — in a section last updated on 15 July 2026, the day the perimeter moved — names “deferred payment credit activity”, as does the neighbouring limb at DISP 2.5.1R(2)(c).

The ombudsman says the same from its own side. Its consumer page on buy now, pay later opens the list of complaints it can consider with a date condition — “We can look at your complaint if you took out the agreement on or after 15 July 2026 and you believe…” — and lists nothing for earlier agreements. That page carries no date stamp; we read it on 29 August 2026.

Two limits on that reading: the Voluntary Jurisdiction only ever bound firms that joined it, so this is not something the cohort lost, and admissibility is the ombudsman’s decision, not a publisher’s.

What this assessment does not claim

“Unregulated” is not “no rights of any kind”. But we will not list routes we have not checked. Section 75 is the obvious candidate, and the FCA states nothing about it for an agreement taken out before 15 July 2026. Nor does the page address chargeback, a lender’s voluntary complaint handling, or the separate contract you hold with the shop. A confident sentence about a route that does not reach you is worse than none.

What to do, in order

Establish the agreement date from your own documents first. Everything else depends on it.

Then put it to the lender in writing, using the word complaint, and ask whether it handles this agreement under its formal complaints procedure and will issue a final response. A firm now authorised, or within temporary permissions, may run one process across its whole book, or may not. Its answer is the useful fact.

If the real problem is the goods rather than the credit, pursue the retailer separately: a different contract, a different counterparty, and conflating the two is how these complaints stall.

The complaint route we assessed after regulation named this boundary as the place it runs out. This is running out, seen from the other side.

Pros and cons

Verdict

The disclosure is adequate and the substance thin, which reverses the usual complaint on this desk. Both bodies state the boundary; neither writes past it.

If that is you, the summary is short. Your agreement sits outside the new regime, and your leverage is the lender’s own procedure plus whatever your contract with the retailer gives you.

Nothing above amounts to advice: Fin Watch is a publisher, not a firm authorised by the Financial Conduct Authority, and holds no permissions of its own. Check a lender’s permissions on the FCA Register rather than here.