The news: Block’s Afterpay dominates US “Pay in 4” installment volume—together owning 70% of total loan value in 2025, per the Federal Reserve of New York.

Block is also the largest BNPL provider by total credit issuance. It originated $53.7 billion in BNPL credit products, for 34% market share.

Why this matters: Cash App Afterpay’s BNPL strategy is working. 

The fintech has long served underbanked or unbanked populations: It advocated for alternative underwriting and created its own credit score to assess consumer health. As a result, Cash App originated $17.6 billion in loans for Q1 2026 in the US and the UK.

Zooming out: Players like Afterpay and PayPal that were later to the BNPL game are cementing control over the space in the US. Affirm, for example, controls 26% of the US market by total issuance but trails Afterpay by more than $12 billion.

While Cash App may reign supreme among the fintech BNPL providers, this study didn’t explore a sizable segment of the BNPL market—credit card-linked installments. Most issuers don’t report the volume of transactions that are converted into installments, but consumers across demographic splits are more likely to use card-linked installments rather than BNPL, per PYMNTS. 

Implications for payment providers: Cash App’s robust lineup for financial products—banking, P2P, lending, debit cards, and BNPL—makes its app stickier than competitors that focused primarily on BNPL and then tried to build out the services that Cash App had already developed before it made BNPL a core part of its strategy.