December already?
Australian Fintech and Startups
Douugh and Humm partnered to offer a BNPL credit service for the US market…Link
…while Flexigroup ($FXL) did a total rebrand to ‘Humm’. Link
Edit: Zip doesn’t allow repayments on their card to other BNPLs thank you to Zip for the correction.
Idle observation on the increasingly-crowded BNPL market (‘Daisy Chaining’): If I purchased something on Afterpay, I can pay it off with Flexigroup’s BNPL credit card ‘Bundll’. I could then pay that Bundll debt down using Zip’s single use card. I could then pay the Zip debt off using Laybuy’s single use card. You could then pay off the Laybuy debt with a Humm card. And bear in mind, it’s likely that all BNPLs will eventually get into cards. So although I have effectively paid off the original Afterpay debt, I now have a complex set of repayment schedules across all BNPL card products, facing a swathe of late fees if I forget. Is this a problem? If so, should providers be prevented from paying off other BNPL debts? What happens if I daisy chain all my expenses then default due to hardship? Also, who will be behind the product that allows people to track these repayments?
APRA provided Transferwise with a restricted banking license. Revolut started out as a cross-border payments network and internationally Transferwise has started getting into the issuing space. Link
Nice post on the history of Tyro - on a whiteboard. Link
Would love to hear your thoughts in the comments below - or sign up for next week 👇🏽
Cashrewards had a successful IPO. Link
Online brokerage Fintech ‘Stake’ now has a premium ‘Black’ product that’s like the VIP experience of broking. Link
Big Tech
Salesforce is buying Slack for $37.6bn. Big pay day for Slack, but I hope the product doesn’t become modular and/or way more expensive and/or super corporate and/or susceptible to a whole bunch of features that nobody wants (e.g. Slack Stories). This happened when Microsoft bought Yammer. Link
Facebook’s cryptocurrency ‘Libra’ was rebranded to ‘Diem’. Better than ‘Carpe’, I guess. Link
Spotify released their ‘Wrapped’ product feature - showing you what songs you listened to most, how long you listened and a bunch more. It genuinely is one of the best product features I have ever seen in an app - doubled by the fact that people have plastered their results over social media. They are soon releasing an article on how they built it which I’ll be sure to share. Link
My top song of 2020 (absolute tune - check it out here)
Jimmy’s Notes
For those who have me on LinkedIn, you’ll know that I missed last week as I was visiting some colleagues in Victoria. It was an incredible time, but the strangest thing was meeting people after ~8.5 months of seeing only their heads in a square box on Zoom. It surprised me that many of them actually had bodies. It’s almost surreal when you see someone in the flesh that you’ve talked to at length over Zoom - your brain struggles to compute and almost sees it as two separate people altogether (aka the one in the computer and the one in the flesh). I chatted to a few colleagues about it and they felt the same way - one of them coining it “the Zoom effect”. Super weird.
Happy Friday.
Trivia
(a) What four letter word can come before all of the following words to create new words? Runner, shadow, sight, stall, thought, and word.
(b) Can you name the six US states that contain the letter ‘Y’?
(c) Bagels in North America are generally prepared in one of two styles. What two cities are those styles named after? (One is in Canada, the other USA)
(d) Which continent contains the world’s driest non-polar desert?
***
Trivia Answers
(a) Fore-
(b) Kentucky, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York, Wyoming, New Jersey
(c) New York style and Montreal style
(d) South America - the Atacama