$80.9m follower assets
BNPL takes a hit
A lot of tweets today about $AAPL putting startups out of business by offering their entire business as one of the features in their ever-expanding ecosystem of products and services. Takes me back to this excellent piece by @jemimajoanna on BNPL
The author very rightly questioned whether this was a sustainable model as a standalone business. The emergence of the likes of Klarna and Affirm have pushed other fintech players to add this as a feature to their existing product portfolio. $AAPL entering the game is bad news for a lot of these guys. As the space gets crowded with much larger tech and payment players, the path to long-term profitability for the standalone models might have to be pushed further down the road.
From the article:
While BNPL is an accelerated method of customer acquisition, all roads in payment somehow point in one direction: bundled/super-app models.
Valuations have already taken a hit this year. $SQ, $PYPL and $AFRM are down massively. The standalone Affirm dropped 5% just yesterday post Apple's WWDC announcement.
Standalones have probably entered the buyout target territory with shares down 50-70% from the highs. Existing players from the payments and tech landscape might already be looking, is my guess.
For whom does something like $AFRM add the most value?


In 'The Innovation Stack' Jim McKelvey has this great passage about copying.
In the case where an incumbent attacks a start-up, often the best thing for the start-up to do is nothing. They can't compete with their innovation stack. He likens Amazon's difficulties to compete with Square's early card reader as an example. Or larger airlines who tried to compete with SouthWest by copying 1 of 20 of their innovation stack blocks.
But in cases where the market is already large and established, copying is typically the best route. That's why we oft see Google copy Apple. Facebook copy other socials, etc. These are not radical innovations, rather features, that help divy up the already congested marketplace of consumers.
BNPL, to me, is one of those features.