I started thinking about poverty monetization while scrolling through X and observing the increasing visibility of instalment payments in Iran. A post complained about the substantial commission SnappPay charged on gross sales and the fact that sellers felt compelled to join its marketplace to gain visibility. According to the post, this had led to a sharp increase in final prices, as sellers sought to cover the commission fee. Looking into this claim, I found that SnappPay’s own merchant guidance states that commission rates differ according to the category of business and the individual contract. In one illustrative calculation, the company assumes an 11 per cent commission, followed by value-added tax equal to 10 per cent of the commission, bringing the total deduction to 12.1 per cent. This means that from 100 million tomans in sales, 12.1 million tomans would be deducted before the merchant receives the remaining amount (SnappPay 2026b).
Nevertheless, the post drew my attention to the structure of the transaction. What struck me was that this mechanism was feeding on a real and growing need in Iranian society: the need for instalment purchases. The possibility that a platform could build a strategy around increasing poverty and reorganize that poverty into a source of revenue revealed to me one of the most brutal faces of a platformized political-capitalist system.
In an economy where prices increase rapidly and wages repeatedly lose purchasing power, instalments may provide real relief for the buyer. The buyer receives the commodity before having saved its full price, assuming that saving that amount would have been possible at all. The seller also reaches a customer who might otherwise leave without purchasing anything. The service presents itself as an expansion of access, allowing consumption to continue under conditions in which immediate payment has become increasingly difficult.
The discomfort arises when one asks why this service has become so necessary. Purchasing on credit exists throughout the world and is certainly not limited to Iran. Buy now, pay later (BNPL) services have expanded rapidly in countries with developed e-commerce markets, higher inflation, inefficient banking systems and limited access to conventional forms of credit. Their consumers also tend to be younger, more indebted and less creditworthy than users of traditional consumer credit (Cornelli, Gambacorta and Pancotto 2023).
Importantly, financially vulnerable people in privileged economies also use instalment credit. In the United Kingdom, BNPL users have been found to be less creditworthy and considerably more likely to experience serious financial distress than the wider population. Still, the most commonly reported uses were lifestyle and beauty purchases and treating oneself or others, while only 8 per cent of users reported using BNPL to cover everyday essential expenses (Financial Conduct Authority 2025). In the United States, BNPL borrowers similarly tend to hold more unsecured debt, and many use several simultaneous BNPL loans (Consumer Financial Protection Bureau 2025).
Therefore, one can conclude that in more privileged settings, instalment purchasing can operate significantly as an extension of consumerist culture, even while it also reaches financially insecure groups. In Iran, the recent economic decline has given the same mechanism a greater degree of material necessity. SnappPay’s services extend beyond clothing, cosmetics and discretionary digital goods to supermarket purchases, food delivery, healthcare-related services, household appliances, baby supplies, stationery, vehicle parts and other commodities connected with everyday life. The platform itself mentions credit as a way of paying for travel, food orders, supermarket purchases and Snapp Doctor services without having the money immediately available (SnappPay 2026a).
The gap between income and the cost of everyday life has widened enough to create a market around this separation. A large and powerful platform can enter this gap and make it commercially productive.
This is what I call poverty monetization. By poverty monetization, I refer to the process through which deteriorating purchasing power, financial insecurity and the inability to pay immediately are reorganized into continuing sources of revenue. Poverty becomes one of the conditions that make the transaction model commercially valuable. The focus here is political. The question concerns the economic conditions under which this service becomes necessary, the actors who profit from it and where its costs are transferred.
When Income Becomes Insufficient
In recent years, Iran’s economic decline has placed severe pressure on household purchasing power. High inflation, currency depreciation, insecure employment and sanctions, together with the state’s predatory conduct and discriminatory distribution of economic resources through political networks, have all contributed to a situation in which income increasingly loses its value.
Research by Laudati and Pesaran shows that sanctions have contributed to exchange-rate depreciation, inflation and reduced output growth in Iran, while Vahabi’s analysis places these pressures within a wider system of political accumulation and state predation (Laudati and Pesaran 2023; Vahabi 2023). The World Bank has also projected rising poverty alongside declining per-capita income and persistent spatial, educational and gender inequalities. Its assessment describes high inflation and declining real incomes as forces suppressing domestic demand and expects poverty to rise further under continuing economic disruption (World Bank 2025).
Under such conditions, the inability to purchase a commodity necessary for everyday life through immediate payment becomes increasingly widespread. Instalment payments thus become a response to this material separation between the cost of living and available wages.
This separation produces a particular condition. Consumers still need commodities necessary for work, education, communication, transport and household survival. However, they enter the market without the immediate purchasing power required to complete the transaction.
This is where the platform positions itself to fill the gap. It supplies temporary purchasing capacity and turns insufficient income into a financial opportunity.
In this case, SnappPay’s four-instalment service publicly offers a way to purchase without a cheque or guarantor. Its appeal is obvious in an economy where access to conventional credit may be difficult or impossible and immediate payment has become increasingly unrealistic. SnappPay promotes the service as four equal instalments without interest or commission for consumers, while describing it as an alternative to conventional credit cards, to which Iranians generally have limited access (SnappPay 2026a).
The consumer therefore experiences the division of payment as an extension of freedom. The commodity becomes available now, while its cost is distributed across the future.
However, a portion of the buyer’s future income has already been committed, and there is no guarantee that this income will retain its value in a rapidly declining economy. Each instalment may become a problem in an unstable economy where even the continued payment of wages cannot always be guaranteed.
In a stable economy, this may present itself as a manageable consumption opportunity. In an inflationary and insecure one, the same arrangement becomes dangerous. The person may accumulate several instalments while other living costs continue to rise. Research from the United States has already demonstrated how easily consumers can hold several simultaneous BNPL loans, making the full extent of their future obligations difficult to perceive at the moment of purchase (Consumer Financial Protection Bureau 2025).
Access to the commodity has been restored, though the material condition that made immediate purchase impossible remains unchanged. The platform therefore offers access without restoring purchasing power. It treats the symptom through a mechanism that ignores the underlying decline and even feeds on it.
The Cost That Disappears
The four-instalment service is promoted to consumers as free of interest and commission. This is an important distinction, since it allows the service to appear separate from recognizable interest-bearing consumer loans. The consumer sees a commodity divided into manageable instalments without an obvious additional charge.
The cost, however, has not necessarily disappeared. It has moved elsewhere in the transaction.
According to SnappPay’s own merchant guidance, the commission varies according to the category of business and the specific contract. The company provides an example in which a merchant selling 100 million tomans of goods pays an 11 per cent commission. Value-added tax equal to 10 per cent of that commission adds another 1.1 per cent of gross sales. In this example, 12.1 million tomans is deducted before the merchant receives the remaining 87.9 million tomans.
The same guidance describes several settlement arrangements. Depending on the contract, the merchant may receive the money during the following month, after two months, in two separate payments or across four monthly payments. SnappPay advises merchants to consult their individual contracts for the exact commission rate and settlement model (SnappPay 2026b).
The commission is calculated as a percentage of the selling price. This becomes significant for businesses operating with narrow margins. If a merchant earns a 15 per cent gross margin and platform-related deductions reach 12.1 per cent of sales, most of that margin may disappear before wages, rent, packaging, delivery, returns and other costs are considered.
The merchant therefore faces several possibilities. These include accepting a lower profit, withdrawing from the service, reducing other expenses, lowering the quality of the commodity, placing greater pressure on workers or increasing prices.
This is where the appearance of a cost-free service becomes questionable. The consumer may see no explicit interest charge, while the seller experiences a considerable deduction from revenue. The cost is removed from the visible moment of credit and placed within the commercial relationship between the platform and the merchant.
The platform can therefore advertise consumer relief while extracting payment from the seller’s need for visibility and access to consumers. At the same time, consumers’ increasing need for instalment payments creates the material conditions through which the platform becomes an important channel of visibility for sellers.
The Merchant Who Cannot Leave
Participation in a platform may be described as a voluntary commercial decision. Formally, this may be correct. The merchant can theoretically reject the conditions and sell elsewhere.
Actual market freedom, however, depends upon the structures surrounding that decision. A large platform brings visibility, consumers, payment infrastructure, data, advertising and the reputational capital of a recognizable brand. As more consumers begin searching specifically for instalment options, merchants outside the platform risk losing access to a growing share of demand.
Participation remains formally voluntary while becoming economically difficult to refuse.
This is one of the main powers of platform capitalism. The platform creates and controls the infrastructure through which consumers and sellers encounter one another. Its position between them allows it to collect commissions, organize visibility, control payment schedules, gather transactional data and determine the conditions of participation (Srnicek 2017).
Sellers join because consumers are present. Consumers join because many sellers have already registered. Each group strengthens the platform’s position over the other. Research on BNPL markets similarly shows that merchants accept comparatively high fees because the platform broadens their customer base, transfers credit risk and may provide marketing and data services (Cornelli, Gambacorta and Pancotto 2023).
Once this cycle develops, the platform becomes an infrastructural gatekeeper. This condition does not require the platform to become a complete monopoly. SnappPay has competitors in Iran. The political-economic question concerns the degree to which access to customers becomes concentrated through a limited number of large and politically embedded platforms.
For the smaller merchant, leaving may preserve the margin while leading to lost sales. Remaining may increase sales while surrendering a significant part of revenue to the platform. In Iran’s declining economy, remaining on a platform that provides instalment access to consumers without immediate purchasing power may still appear more profitable than leaving it.
Platformized Political Capitalism
The Iranian context gives these mechanisms a specific political-economic structure. Mehrdad Vahabi (2023) describes the Islamic Republic through the concept of Islamic political capitalism. In this system, political and coercive power occupy a central place in economic accumulation. Access to property, contracts, profitable opportunities and institutional protection is conditioned by proximity to the circles of political authority. In Vahabi’s analysis, this structure provides sources of predatory revenue that remain opaque and outside ordinary public-finance accountability. Its consequences include rent-seeking, grabbing, hoarding, capital flight, declining domestic investment and economic stagnation.
This exclusive political-capitalist economy survives through a selective relationship with the global market. Iran remains connected to global trade and financial circulation, although a significant portion of this connection passes through sanctions-evasion mechanisms, informal intermediaries, front companies, shadow banking and politically protected networks. While sanctions have severely damaged the wider economy through currency depreciation, inflation and declining output, they have also increased the opacity of accumulation mechanisms. Actors capable of moving goods, oil and money through protected and concealed channels gain opportunities unavailable to ordinary businesses. Official sanctions investigations have repeatedly documented layered front companies, foreign exchange networks and shadow-financial arrangements connected with Iranian state and military institutions.
Sanctions therefore interact with the exclusive political-capitalist system in a destructive way. They increase hardship for the population and weaken independent economic activity while, at the same time, creating scarcity rents and concealed routes of accumulation for actors located closer to coercive and political power. The economic isolation of society therefore coexists with the international movement of wealth belonging to privileged institutions and individuals. The same conditions that reduce the purchasing power of ordinary households can strengthen organizations capable of accumulating through opacity, scarcity and political protection.
Capitalism adapts to the material and institutional conditions of each society. In this case, platform capitalism develops within the existing political-capitalist system. This combination can be described as platformized political capitalism: a formation in which digital intermediaries organize markets while remaining embedded within an economy structured through political access, regulatory discretion, para-state power and unequal protection.
Direct ownership is one possible relationship between political power and a platform. In the case of SnappPay, direct ownership by the IRGC or another para-state organization remains unproven. Political embeddedness, however, does not require direct ownership. In this economy, a large platform depends upon banking infrastructure, regulatory permission, data access and continued authorization to operate. In an opaque and coercive economy, access to these conditions becomes entangled with political proximity and institutional protection.
The system therefore contains several connected layers. Para-state and politically protected institutions accumulate through opacity, coercive access and exclusive control; large platforms reproduce aspects of this structure through infrastructural gatekeeping and control over market visibility; and finally, smaller merchants surrender part of their revenue to remain visible to consumers who rely on the platform because ordinary wages can no longer cover immediate purchases.
Although these actors do not benefit equally and their participation is not equally voluntary, they are incorporated into the same political-economic structure. The poverty produced through the wider exclusive system becomes a condition for the expansion of the platform operating inside it. Platformized political capitalism feeds on the social consequences of political capitalism, while its operation may further deepen the dependence, price pressures and inequalities from which it draws its value.
The Cycle Returns to the Buyer
Poverty monetization becomes fully visible when the cost travels through the transaction and returns to the person whose lack of purchasing power created the market opportunity in the first place.
The cycle presents itself as follows. The consumer cannot easily pay the full price. The instalment platform supplies access. The merchant pays for access to instalment consumers through commissions and settlement conditions. The merchant may then raise the price in order to preserve its margin. The higher price makes immediate payment even more difficult. The consumer becomes more dependent upon instalments, the platform becomes more successful, and the material conditions through which the platform monetizes poverty become stronger.
Declining purchasing power produces demand for instalment credit; instalment demand attracts sellers; seller participation strengthens the platform; platform commissions place pressure on prices and margins; higher prices deepen dependence upon credit. The cycle can therefore reproduce itself.
There remains considerable room for research here. This cycle should be empirically investigated through comparisons between cash and instalment prices, examinations of merchant contracts, calculations of margins, documentation of settlement periods and interviews with businesses across different sectors.
It remains uncertain how easily such research could be conducted under politically oppressive and commercially opaque conditions. Sellers may hesitate to provide contracts or speak openly about a powerful platform, and researchers may have limited access to reliable company and ownership data.
The structural possibility nevertheless remains clear. A service created in response to declining affordability may become one of the mechanisms through which commodities become more expensive, reinforcing the material conditions on which its own prosperity depends. Poverty becomes structural to the business model while remaining a social tragedy. It enters the calculation, supplies the credit-dependent consumer, disciplines the merchant through fear of losing customers and legitimizes the platform through the language of access.
In an economy this harsh, there is little room for the platform to present itself as compassionate. The model visibly feeds on poverty and may reproduce it as part of its strategy for prosperity.
Where Does the Relief End?
Poverty monetization names the conversion of economic insecurity into a market relation. It describes the material condition in which insufficient wages, rising prices and the inability to purchase ordinary goods generate a commercial opportunity for an intermediary positioned between buyer and seller.
In the case of SnappPay, the service may provide real relief. A person may receive an essential commodity without paying the entire amount immediately, and the merchant may complete a sale that would otherwise have been lost. These are the functions that make the model appear useful and give it strength.
The political question concerns the direction in which this usefulness develops. Does the service expand people’s material capacity, or does it organize their declining capacity into a profitable system? Does it reduce exclusion from the market, or make continued participation dependent upon surrendering future income? Does it support merchants, or make them pay an increasing price for access to consumers whose purchasing power has already decreased?
Under platformized political capitalism, these questions reach beyond consumer finance. They concern the ownership and control of the infrastructure through which everyday economic life becomes possible. The platform oversees the buyer, the seller, the commodity, the payment and the debt. It stands in the middle of a society whose economic decline produces increasing dependence on exactly this position.
The person at the checkout sees four smaller payments where one impossible payment previously stood. The immediate problem appears to have been solved. The commodity can be purchased, the seller completes the transaction, and the platform records another successful expansion of access. However, wages remain insufficient, and prices remain high. Poverty has been divided into four manageable payments, turning it into a business model.
References
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (2025) Consumer Use of Buy Now, Pay Later and Other Unsecured Debt. Washington, DC: CFPB.
Cornelli, G., Gambacorta, L. and Pancotto, L. (2023) ‘Buy now, pay later: a cross-country analysis’, BIS Quarterly Review, December, pp. 61–75.
Financial Conduct Authority (2025) Distress Deferred? The Impact of Buy Now Pay Later Credit on Consumer Indebtedness and Arrears. Occasional Paper 69. London: FCA.
Laudati, D. and Pesaran, M. H. (2023) ‘Identifying the effects of sanctions on the Iranian economy using newspaper coverage’, Journal of Applied Econometrics, 38(3), pp. 271–294.
SnappPay (2026a) ‘SnappPay credit service and four-instalment purchasing’. Official SnappPay website. Accessed 4 August 2026.
SnappPay (2026b) ‘Guide to calculating SnappPay sales, commissions and settlement dates’. SnappPay Merchant Academy, 20 April. Accessed 4 August 2026.
Srnicek, N. (2017) Platform Capitalism. Cambridge: Polity.
Vahabi, M. (2023) Destructive Coordination, Anfal and Islamic Political Capitalism: A New Reading of Contemporary Iran. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.
World Bank (2025) Islamic Republic of Iran Poverty and Equity Brief: April 2025. Washington, DC: World Bank.