What the Hell is BNPL?
Uncanny Valley | WIRED
WIRED
4.1 • 570 Ratings
🗓️ 1 December 2022
⏱️ 33 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Money is tight these days. Holiday shopping, ballooning inflation, and a looming recession have forced people to more carefully consider their finances. Those factors might help explain the explosion of Buy Now, Pay Later services. BNPL plans offered by companies like Affirm, Afterpay, and Klarna let you spread the cost of a purchase over multiple installments, without the fees or interest rates of most credit cards. Of course, free money always comes with a catch.
This week on Gadget Lab, we dig into the Buy Now, Pay Later phenomenon and what it means for the future of shopping.
Show Notes
Read Lauren’s interview with Max Levchin. Check out more of WIRED’s reporting about buy now, pay later programs. Follow our coverage of all things ecommerce.
Recommendations
Lauren recommends the third season of the show Dead to Me. Mike recommends the Select Five podcast, specifically the episode with him on it (episode 19).
Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is @snackfight. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Our theme music is by Solar Keys.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Lauren. |
| 0:00.8 | Mike. |
| 0:01.6 | Lauren, how are you paying for things these days? |
| 0:04.2 | P-to-P, B-NPL, good old-fashioned, C-C? |
| 0:07.9 | Are you using all these abbreviations because we're a tech show and tech companies love to |
| 0:12.5 | abbreviate things? |
| 0:13.7 | No. |
| 0:14.6 | I'm using all these abbreviations because I'm trying to be hip. |
| 0:17.7 | That might be worse. |
| 0:18.9 | Okay. |
| 0:19.6 | What I'm actually really fascinated by is this whole trend of |
| 0:22.9 | buy now, pay later and how techies are trying to disrupt borrowing. They are, in fact, |
| 0:28.5 | trying to disrupt borrowing. And we should definitely talk about this. Let's get to it. All right. |
| 0:44.6 | Hi, everyone. Welcome to GadgetLab. I am Michael Colori. I'm a senior editor at Wired. |
| 0:52.7 | And I'm LG. I'm an SW at W. Awesome. I'm Lauren Good. I'm a senior writer at Wired. I'm trying to abbreviate everything. |
| 0:59.9 | So a lot of us have got money on our minds these days. It's the end of the year. The holidays are here. |
| 1:05.2 | Inflation is still making it all sting. And of course, there's all the online shopping. |
| 1:11.4 | If you're doing any of it, you have surely noticed all of those options that let you buy something now and pay for it later. |
| 1:15.5 | And when you check out on a web store, you'll see offers from companies like a firm, |
| 1:21.7 | Klarna, and Afterpay, all giving you the option to pay for things in installments rather than all at once. |
| 1:29.1 | This is the rise of Buy Now Pay Later, BNPL for short, and yes, it's yet another way that big tech is trying to disrupt your wallet. |
| 1:31.2 | Lauren, you've been reporting on Buy Now Pay Later for a while, and you've just talked with |
... |
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