I'm David Brown, and this is Business Wars. Buy Now Pay Later services have reshaped the way we purchase things. They've turned big-ticket items into little treats. Instead of

throwing that new jacket on a credit card, you can make four small interest-free payments.

And that's not debt. That's a budgeting hack. Yeah, right. These payments may be minor. They may seem

small at first. But the debt can really start to snowball.

More than 60% of buy-now pay-later customers have multiple loans out at once.

Luxury purchases are still the most common application, but a growing number of people are also using these apps to fund necessities like groceries and medical bills,

as prices for everyday goods continue to climb. And now the credit scoring company FICO has

announced that it will factor by now pay later loans into its models. That could have big

consequences for regular users of those apps who might have considered them safer than

credit cards. Financial technology or fintech became popular over the past decade and a half

because it made banking more accessible and convenient. But have we started putting too much

trust into apps like Chime, Cash App, and Clarna? Or have these services come full circle,

proving to be no better or safer than the traditional banks they sought to replace?

Adam Clark Estes is a senior technology correspondent for Vox, and he's written about fintech

and tried out a lot of services for himself. He's sharing what he learned, like which

ones to trust and when, and how these apps affect our growing affordability crisis. Later, Annie

Joy Williams of the Atlantic talks with us about a pattern she noticed in the marketing of these

buy-now pay-later apps. Some campaigns contained a whole lot of pink plus cute colorful

murals and collaborations with Y2K divas. It looked to her like the apps were targeting young women,

so she started to dig. Annie Joy explains what she found in her reporting and how she was also

pulled into the buy now pay later cycle as a young college student.

We'll look at the future of these services in a world where more and more young people claim that

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