The views expressed on this podcast are those of the participants, not of Roiders News.

Welcome to the views room. I'm Rob Cox, the editor of Breaking Views, the financial commentary arm of Reuters News.

Coming to you from Zurich, Switzerland.

Well, this week, I'm handing over the podcast fully to my colleagues down under.

They'll walk us through the $29 billion deal that Square Chief Executive Jack Dorsey struck this week for afterpay

and how the combined firm could pose a bigger challenge to entrench traditional banks and payments companies.

Over to you guys.

In a booming year of M&A, we've just had a colossal transaction for Australia, the biggest ever,

really, with Square buying afterpay.

I'm Jeff Goldfarb here in Melbourne with my colleague Anthony Curry.

Anthony, this deal really, all kinds of interesting facets, both from the seller side, afterpay and from square.

When we start with afterpay and this product that they've just kind of really been a pioneer in

in the modern era. Yeah, it's an amazing story, really, isn't it? So this company is about, I think,

seven years old. It went public in 2016 on the Australian Stock Exchange. And it basically does installment payments, you know,

higher purchase, the kind of things that our parents used to talk about all those years ago,

or that then got replaced by credit cards. But it does it in a different way. It doesn't

really charge anything, at least not to us, the borrowers.

It's all done mostly by charging the merchants. And it basically does things like, let's say,

for example, you make a payment and you'll pay back in four installments over, say, a month or two months. So the credit risk is meant to be lower. Afterpay doesn't take too much credit risk on,

although there's arguments about how much out there in the market. And it's become very quickly the darling of the Australian

fintech market. In fact, the Australian market, in many respects, it's gone up 12-fold, or actually

by its peak, I think it's got up 12-4 or more from the depths of the pandemic in March last year.

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