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Equity

BNPL is not a winner-takes-all game

Equity

TechCrunch

News, Business, Entrepreneurship, Business News, Technology

4.2372 Ratings

🗓️ 10 September 2021

⏱️ 22 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Natasha and Mary Ann took over this week's show with Chris and Grace, which meant that our overdeveloped senses of curiosity filled up the script just fine (even on a somewhat short week). Unintentionally, today's episode was built around a theme of inclusion - from auto-insurance to women's health, and from payments to knowledge. But here are some more specifics on what we got into: For our funding round section, we discussed UK’s Marshmallow getting unicorn status for its more inclusive, big-data take on car insurance, Women’s health tech brand, Elvie, topping up its Series C to $97M, and an ambitious fintech play from Leap, which wants to give gig workers access to financial products by partnering directly to marketplaces.  After getting past the dollars and the deals, I indulged by bringing up my latest piece: Edtech leans into the creator economy with cohort-based classes. The core of the story gets into a ton of tensions, the biggest of which I'd pose as a question to you: should anyone be allowed to be a teacher? Then we headed into Mary Ann's world of fintech to understand what I dubbed feels like national BNPL week. If I may, I'd argue that this is the can't miss segment of the entire show, as we made sense of why it's a global phenomenon, which markets are popping off, and what this means for the credit card industry. Below is a smattering of headlines we walked through. PayPal acquires Japan’s Paidy for $2.7B to crack the buy-now, pay-later market in Asia  Zip acquisition of Payflex means Africa is ripe for BNPL disruption Addi raises $75M to advance ‘buy now, pay later’ in LatAm, nearly triples valuation And then we ended by talking about an adorable, but potentially dangerous robot unicorn. Yep. You read that right. Remember when we were all thinking about what 'the new normal' would look like? Well, I guess it's here. Credits: Equity is produced by Theresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. Bryce Durbin is our Illustrator. We'd also like to thank the audience development team and Henry Pickavet, who manages TechCrunch audio products. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

Hello and welcome back to Equity, Tech Crunch's venture capital focused

0:14.2

podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. I'm Natasha

0:18.6

Masquerainis and joining me is Senior Tech Crunch reporter and my bestie Marianne Osavado.

0:24.4

Marianne, how are you?

0:26.2

I'm good, excited to be here again.

0:28.7

I know, it's always fun when we're running this show.

0:30.7

I remember there was one week at Crunchbase where it was just

0:33.5

women on the team and we just were like let's make everything like let's blow

0:37.6

everything up so I think that should be the energy we have for today's show as well.

0:41.6

I love it I love it. We are talking about FinTech and Ed Tech

0:46.1

but we're starting with a mixed bag of funding rounds. I think we should start

0:48.9

with what's happening in UK. Marshmallow recently raised 85 million on a 1.25 billion valuation for, and I'll read

0:57.4

from the headline directly, a more inclusive big data take on car insurance.

1:01.8

Mary Ann, I know you've been doing insured tech coverage.

1:05.0

Is this idea of like inclusive insured tech popular?

1:08.0

Is this new?

1:09.0

How like shocking is this headline to you?

1:12.0

It's not shocking. I think it's probably a big deal for a couple of reasons in the UK. Number one, it's one of the few UK startups with black founders to become a unicorn. So that's very cool in and of itself just

1:24.4

outside of the whole insurance angle they are following a similar approach to

1:27.9

some insuring text here in the US where they're using data and algorithms so that they

1:32.0

can help provide more affordable rates to more people and get a more diverse set of customers.

1:36.1

So that's where the inclusion piece comes in.

...

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