Upgrade CEO Renaud Laplanche speaks at a conference in Brooklyn, New York, in 2018.
Alex Flynn | Bloomberg via Getty Images
U.S. fintech start-up Upgrade is set to enter the increasingly crowded buy now, pay later market.
Upgrade, which was founded by former LendingClub boss Renaud Laplanche in 2016, is a digital banking start-up that offers people payment cards along with personal lines of credit.
Unlike a credit card, which lets consumers revolve their balance, Upgrade takes all the purchases someone makes in a month and creates an installment plan for paying down the debt. The payment plans are typically long-term, ranging anywhere from six to 36 months, and charge a fixed interest rate.
Now, Upgrade plans to launch a buy now, pay later-style product that lets users pay off their debt in four months, without accruing any interest. The company expects to debut the new service in the coming months, Laplanche told CNBC.
“We are working on a version of the Upgrade Card that’s better suited for smaller expenses,” Upgrade’s CEO said in an interview. “In that case, we don’t need to charge interest because it’s a smaller amount.”
Buy now, pay later, or BNPL, has boomed to become a $100 billion industry thanks in large part to the coronavirus pandemic which accelerated the growth of online shopping.
BNPL services let shoppers spread the cost of their purchases over three or four months. Rather than charging consumers, BNPL companies make their money by taking a small fee from merchants on each transaction.
Upgrade’s product will be different to those offered by firms like Klarna, Affirm and Afterpay. Instead of adding a checkout option on merchants’ websites, Upgrade will lump a user’s card purchases together and invoice them what they owe over a four-month period.
“What we like about embedding the product into a card is the broader acceptance,” Laplanche told CNBC. “BNPL often relies on partnerships with merchants.”
“It’s starting to get mainstream online,” he added. “But not so much in-store.”
Prior to starting Upgrade, Laplanche helped grow LendingClub into the world’s largest peer-to-peer lending platform, connecting investors with borrowers through its marketplace. However, he was ousted in 2016 amid irregularities with loan practices and Laplanche’s alleged lack of disclosure over a personal investment.
Last year, LendingClub shut down its peer-to-peer loans platform and signaled a push into banking with its acquisition of U.S. lender Radius.
Laplanche has come a long way since his exit from LendingClub, with Upgrade reaching a $3.3 billion valuation in August. The French-born entrepreneur said it would be a while yet before Upgrade goes public, but he wants to make sure the company is IPO-ready in the next 18 months.
“We clearly have the size,” he said. “We’re growing very, very fast. We’ve been profitable now for more than a year, which is rare for a company that is growing that fast.”
“We can hopefully be ready sometime in the next 18 months. Then we’ll make a decision at that time on what’s best for our shareholders and our team members.”
Fintechs jump into BNPL
Upgrade isn’t the only fintech jumping on the BNPL bandwagon. Fast, a start-up backed by payments giant Stripe, plans to offer BNPL as a payment method through its platform. The firm, which lets users purchase items in one click across a range of websites, is aiming to roll out the feature in the first quarter of 2022, CEO and co-founder Domm Holland told CNBC.
“It’s a payment method that we need to support because a certain amount of consumers want to use it a certain percentage of the time,” Holland said. “For me, it’s just a way of addressing a larger share of wallet for our merchants.”
In the U.K., digital bank Monzo has begun offering a BNPL-like product called Flex, which lets customers split payments into monthly installments, either interest-free for three months or at a 19% rate for six to 12 months. Rival firm Revolut is also planning to introduce a BNPL feature.
It highlights growing interest from companies big and small in the booming BNPL market. PayPal debuted its own version of the service, called Pay in 4, last year. Meanwhile, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s payments processor Square reached a deal to acquire Australia’s Afterpay for $29 billion, and Mastercard jumped into the space this week with an installments program for banks and fintechs.
Still, the BNPL sector has become the subject of much scrutiny lately. The British government is planning to impose tougher regulatory checks on the fast-growing industry amid concerns that services like Klarna are encouraging shoppers to spend more than they can afford. The U.K. Treasury department is expected to release a consultation on the reforms next month.
Roblox on Friday announced new short-video and AI features that come amid increasing lawmaker scrutiny into how the company protects children on its platform.
With Roblox Moments, users 13 and older will be able to create and share video clips of their gameplay with others on a feed within the platform. The artificial intelligence additions, meanwhile, will allow users to generate advanced 3D objects for the games they create on the platform.
Tune in at 4:15 p.m. ET: Roblox CEO Dave Baszucki joins CNBC TV to discuss the company’s latest announcements coming out of its developer conference. Watch in real time on CNBC+ or the CNBC Pro stream.
Although users can share video clips from mature games on Moments, users who do not meet the age requirements of those experiences will be unable to view them, the company said. Roblox will moderate each video shared on Moments and will allow users to “flag content that they find is inappropriate,” said Matt Kaufman, Roblox safety chief. Moments is launching in a limited release on Friday.
The AI features will roll out to users before the end of the year. Roblox users will be able to use the artificial intelligence tools to create objects, like futuristic monster trucks, that match the aesthetics of the games users build on the platform, said Anupam Singh, Roblox’s senior vice president of engineering. Those creations will also be moderated, Kaufman said.
Roblox faces a number of lawsuits alleging that its design enables online predators to exploit underage victims.
Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill sued Roblox in August, alleging the company fails to implement robust safety protocols to “protect child users from predators.” At the time, Roblox said, “any assertion that Roblox would intentionally put our users at risk of exploitation is simply untrue.”
The company on Wednesday announced it would expand an age estimation program that Roblox debuted in July.
Google was on Friday hit with a 2.95-billion-euro ($3.45 billion) antitrust fine from European Union regulators for anti-competitive practices in its lucrative advertising technology business.
The European Commission, which is the executive body of the EU, accused Google of distorting competition in the so-called adtech market by unfairly favoring its own display advertising technology services to the detriment of rival adtech providers, advertisers and online publishers.
It also ordered Google to “bring these self-preferencing practices to an end” and “implement measures to cease its inherent conflicts of interest along the adtech supply chain.” The company has 60 days to respond.
“Today’s decision shows that Google abused its dominant position in adtech harming publishers, advertisers, and consumers. This behaviour is illegal under EU antitrust rules,” EU competition chief Teresa Ribera said in a statement Friday.
“Google must now come forward with a serious remedy to address its conflicts of interest, and if it fails to do so, we will not hesitate to impose strong remedies.”
Google’s global head of regulatory affairs, Lee-Anne Mulholland, said the EU decision is “wrong” and the firm will appeal.
“It imposes an unjustified fine and requires changes that will hurt thousands of European businesses by making it harder for them to make money,” Mulholland said. “There’s nothing anticompetitive in providing services for ad buyers and sellers, and there are more alternatives to our services than ever before.”
The case dates back to 2021 when the EU first opened a probe into Google to assess whether the tech giant favors its own online display ad technology services.
The news comes after Reuters reported earlier this week that the Commission had delayed the fine as regulators were waiting for the U.S. to cut tariffs on European cars as part of a trade deal.
Broadcom shares soared 15% on Friday after the chipmaker said on its earnings call that it had secured a new $10 billion customer. Analysts quickly pointed to OpenAI.
Following a better-than-expected earnings report late Thursday, Broadcom CEO Hock Tan told analysts that a fourth large customer had put in orders for $10 billion in custom artificial intelligence chips, which the company calls XPUs.
“One of these prospects released production orders to Broadcom, and we have accordingly characterized them as a qualified customer for XPUs,” Tan said. He added that the order increased Broadcom’s forecast for AI revenue next year, when shipments will begin.
Analysts at Mizuho, Cantor Fitzgerald and KeyBanc all said they think AI startup OpenAI is the customer. The Financial Times reported on Thursday, citing people familiar with the partnership, that the two companies co-designed a chip that will hit the market next year.
OpenAI declined to comment on the report.
While Broadcom doesn’t name its large web-scale customers, analysts have said dating back to last year that its first three clients were Google, Meta and TikTok parent ByteDance.
“During the call, the company surprised us by noting that it had secured a $10B order from a fourth XPU customer (we believe this is OpenAI), adding significant upside to the company’s three current XPU customers (Google, Meta, and ByteDance),” analysts at Cantor wrote in a note late Thursday. “Shipments are expected to commence in 2026.”
Broadcom’s stock has been on a tear of late as the company has joined Nvidia at the front of the race to build the kinds of processors and infrastructures needed for massive AI workloads. The stock is up about 130% in the past year, lifting Broadcom’s market cap past $1.6 trillion.
For the fiscal third quarter, Broadcom reported earnings and revenue that topped estimates. The company said it expects $17.4 billion in fourth-quarter revenue, higher than the $17.02 billion expected by Wall Street analysts, with AI revenue reaching $6.2 billion.
But news of an incoming $10 billion customer is what got Wall Street excited.
Tan said on the call that “immediate and fairly substantial demand” boosts the outlook for next year, “and really changes our thinking of what 2026 would be starting to look like.”
The company didn’t provide specific guidance for next year, but Tan suggested that growth in its AI could be above the 50% to 60% range he’d offered in the prior call.
Analysts at Mizuho raised their AI revenue growth estimate for next year to 76% up from about 60%, which would bring the total to $35 billion. Total revenue for the year ending in October 2026 is expected to increase about 30% to $81.8 billion from $63.1 billion this fiscal year, according to analysts surveyed by LSEG.
In addition to hardware, Broadcom has a large software business, keyed by its $61 billion acquisition of server virtualization software vendor VMware in 2023. Revenue in the infrastructure software business, which includes VMWare, rose 43% to $6.79 billion.