What if shops had to bid for you?

By Dr. Milad Armani Dehghani, Founder, LayawayGo

A few months ago I watched a friend buy a sofa. She found it online, hesitated at the price, then clicked the button that split it into four payments and moved on with her evening. The whole thing took about forty seconds. It struck me that we have built something remarkable: borrowing has become the easiest thing you can do with a phone.

Saving for the same sofa, by contrast, is a chore nobody has bothered to improve. You open a savings pot, give it a name, and the app forgets about you. Three months later you have the money, you walk into the shop, and you pay full price like everyone else. Nobody rewards you for the patience. Nobody even notices.

Since 15 July, Buy Now Pay Later has been a regulated product in the UK. The FCA counts 11 million people using it, and around 60% of users aged 18 to 28 are juggling two to five plans at once. The new rules are good, and overdue. But they protect the person who borrows. They do nothing for the person who chooses to wait.

That gap is where LayawayGo lives, and the way we fill it is a little unusual. We ask merchants to bid.

Turning the marketplace around

Every marketplace you have ever used runs the same way. Shops list what they have, shoppers search, and the shopper does all the work: comparing, haggling, hunting for a discount code at eleven at night. The merchant’s only job is to be found.

Now flip it.

Imagine someone in Glasgow who wants to propose this summer. They set a goal in the app: an engagement ring, lab-grown diamond, white gold, somewhere between £1,800 and £2,200, needed within three months. They start saving. Nothing dramatic, just a bit each week.

When they are about 70% of the way there, the app does not send them off to trawl websites. Instead it quietly sends the goal, stripped of anything personal, to jewellers who could fulfil it, and invites them to compete.

Three independent jewellers come back. One offers 12% off. One offers 10% off plus free resizing and a lifetime clean. The third offers only 8% off, but has the exact setting in stock, can hand it over in person this week, and has barely missed a delivery in years. The saver sees all three, ranked, with the reasons laid out, and picks the one that suits them.

That is a reverse auction, and I find it genuinely satisfying to watch. It changes who works for whom. The merchant is competing for a customer who has already decided to buy and is visibly on the way to affording it. The saver is rewarded not because anyone is being charitable, but because they hold the one thing merchants will pay most for: certainty.

Paying towards something before you take it home is an old idea. My grandparents would have called it layaway. The auction is the part that makes it new.

So what does the AI actually do?

“AI-powered” is on every fintech slide in the country, so let me be precise. There are three jobs the AI does here, and none of them involves a chatbot.

It understands what people mean. Nobody types a goal like a product database. They type “ring for a proposal in the summer, something simple, white gold, don’t want to go over two grand”. AI MatchBuy™ acts like a pesonalised AI agent and turns that into something a merchant can act on: category, must-have features, budget, deadline, location, and how far along the saving is. That is all a merchant ever sees. Not the saver’s name, not their balance, not their financial history. Just enough to price the opportunity properly.

It knows when to open the auction. This is subtler than it sounds. Open too early and merchants waste bids on people who may never get there. Open too late and the saver has lost the benefit of planning ahead. MatchBuy watches saving progress and timing, and opens the auction when a goal is genuinely ready to buy. Merchants only ever bid on real, funded demand, which is why they take it seriously.

It ranks the offers, and shows its working. Every bid is scored on price, timing, distance, service and the merchant’s track record, weighted by what the saver said matters to them. The score is visible. A merchant can enter the auction, but no merchant can buy the top spot, and the saver always makes the final call. We filed a UK patent application for the method, and we built the ranking to be auditable from the first line of code, because a recommendation engine that touches people’s money has to be able to explain itself.

The bigger shift underneath all this

There is a reason to build this now rather than in five years. Retail is moving towards AI agents that search and buy on our behalf, and platforms like Shopify have started opening their catalogues to those agents. When that becomes normal, the scarce thing in commerce will no longer be shelf space or ad budget. It will be trustworthy intent: an agent that knows what a person wants, when they want it, and that the money is really there.

MatchBuy™is built as exactly that kind of agent, with one difference from most of the others. It works for the saver, not the shop. From day one a saver can see wide choice drawn from the open catalogues, alongside exclusive offers from merchants who have joined LayawayGo and chosen to compete. The open market sets the benchmark. The auction beats it.

What LayawayGo is, in one breath

LayawayGo is a Save Now Buy Later platform built around that engine. You set a goal, you save towards it with your own money, and when you are ready, merchants compete for you. No credit, no interest, and no fee for savers, ever. We are not a lender and we never will be. Saved balances sit with regulated payment providers, purchases are paid in the merchant’s own checkout, and merchants pay us only when a sale completes.

We did not start by building. We started by asking more than 1,200 young people across three countries whether they would use something like this, and listening carefully to the ones who said no. The answers shaped a working proof of concept, backed by £122,000 of Scottish Government Proof of Concept funding. We are now preparing a pilot with the University of Strathclyde, the University of Dundee and more than seven merchants, ahead of a commercial launch in Scotland in early 2027.

If you run a merchant network, work in payments, or spend your days around students, I would genuinely like to hear from you.

A closing thought

Regulation has made borrowing safer. The next job is to make saving worth it.

For a decade, the cleverest technology in retail has been pointed at one question: how do we find the shopper? I think the more interesting question is the one nobody has asked yet. What happens when merchants have to find the saver, and compete for them?

Somebody is going to build that. I would like it to be built here.

Dr. Milad Armani Dehghani is the Founder of LayawayGo Ltd, a Scottish fintech building Save Now Buy Later powered by AI MatchBuy™. LinkedIn · layawaygo.com

LayawayGo Ltd is one of the fintechs in our thriving community. View all of the fintechs in our community here.