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.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman visits “Making Money With Charles Payne” at Fox Business Network Studios in New York on Dec. 4, 2024.
Mike Coppola | Getty Images
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s sister, Ann Altman, filed a lawsuit on Monday, alleging that her brother sexually abused her regularly between the years of 1997 and 2006.
The lawsuit, which was filed in U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of Missouri, alleges that the abuse took place at the family’s home in Clayton, Missouri, and began when Ann, who goes by Annie, was three and Sam was 12. The filing claims that the abusive activities took place “several times per week,” beginning with oral sex and later involving penetration.
The lawsuit claims that “as a direct and proximate result of the foregoing acts of sexual assault,” the plaintiff has experienced “severe emotional distress, mental anguish, and depression, which is expected to continue into the future.”
The younger Altman has publicly made similar sexual assault allegations against her brother in the past on platforms like X, but this is the first time she’s taken him to court. She’s being represented by Ryan Mahoney, whose Illinois-based firm specializes in matters including sexual assault and harassment.
The lawsuit requests a jury trial and damages in excess of $75,000.
In a joint statement on X with his mother, Connie, and his brothers Jack and Max, Sam Altman denied the allegations.
“Annie has made deeply hurtful and entirely untrue claims about our family, and especially Sam,” the statement said. “We’ve chosen not to respond publicly, out of respect for her privacy and our own. However, she has now taken legal action against Sam, and we feel we have no choice but to address this.”
Their response says “all of these claims are utterly untrue,” adding that “this situation causes immense pain to our entire family.” They said that Ann Altman faces “mental health challenges” and “refuses conventional treatment and lashes out at family members who are genuinely trying to help.”
Sam Altman has gained international prominence since OpenAI’s debut of the artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT in November 2022. Backed by Microsoft, the company was most recently valued at $157 billion, with funding coming from Thrive Capital, chipmaker Nvidia, SoftBank and others.
Altman was briefly ousted from the CEO role by OpenAI’s board in November 2023, but was quickly reinstated due to pressure from investors and employees.
This isn’t the only lawsuit the tech exec faces.
In March, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk sued OpenAI and co-founders Altman and Greg Brockman, alleging breach of contract and fiduciary duty. Musk, who now runs a competing AI startup, xAI, was a co-founder of OpenAI when it began as a nonprofit in 2015. Musk left the board in 2018 and has publicly criticized OpenAI for allegedly abandoning its original mission.
Musk is suing to keep OpenAI from turning into a for-profit company. In June, Musk withdrew the original complaint filed in a San Francisco state court and later refiled in federal court.
Last month, OpenAI clapped back against Musk, claiming in a blog post that in 2017 Musk “not only wanted, but actually created, a for-profit” to serve as the company’s proposed new structure.
This photo illustration created on January 7, 2025, in Washington, DC, shows an image of Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, and an image of the Meta logo.
Drew Angerer | Afp | Getty Images
Meta employees took to their internal forum on Tuesday, criticizing the company’s decision to end third-party fact-checking on its services two weeks before President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration.
Company employees voiced their concern after Joel Kaplan, Meta’s new chief global affairs officer and former White House deputy chief of staff under former President George W. Bush, announced the content policy changes on Workplace, the in-house communications tool.
“We’re optimistic that these changes help us return to that fundamental commitment to free expression,” Kaplan wrote in the post, which was reviewed by CNBC.
The content policy announcement follows a string of decisions that appear targeted to appease the incoming administration. On Monday, Meta added new members to its board, including UFC CEO Dana White, a longtime friend of Trump, and the company confirmed last month that it was contributing $1 million to Trump’s inauguration.
Among the latest changes, Kaplan announced that Meta will scrap its fact-checking program and shift to a user-generated system like X’s Community Notes. Kaplan, who took over his new role last week, also said that Meta will lift restrictions on certain topics and focus its enforcement on illegal and high-severity violations while giving users “a more personalized approach to political content.”
One worker wrote they were “extremely concerned” about the decision, saying it appears Meta is “sending a bigger, stronger message to people that facts no longer matter, and conflating that with a victory for free speech.”
Another employee commented that by “simply absolving ourselves from the duty to at least try to create a safe and respective platform is a really sad direction to take.” Other comments expressed concern about the impact the policy change could have on the discourse around topics like immigration, gender identity and gender, which, according to one employee, could result in an “influx of racist and transphobic content.”
A separate employee said they were scared that “we’re entering into really dangerous territory by paving the way for the further spread of misinformation.”
The changes weren’t universally criticized, as some Meta workers congratulated the company’s decision to end third-party fact checking. One wrote that X’s Community Notes feature has “proven to be a much better representation of the ground truth.”
Another employee commented that the company should “provide an accounting of the worst outcomes of the early years” that necessitated the creation of a third-party fact-checking program and whether the new policies would prevent the same type of fall out from happening again.
As part of the company’s massive layoffs in 2023, Meta also scrapped an internal fact-checking project, CNBC reported. That project would have let third-party fact checkers like the Associated Press and Reuters, in addition to credible experts, comment on flagged articles in order to verify the content.
Although Meta announced the end of its fact-checking program on Tuesday, the company had already been pulling it back. In September, a spokesperson for the AP told CNBC that the news agency’s “fact-checking agreement with Meta ended back in January” 2024.
Dana White, CEO of the Ultimate Fighting Championship gestures as he speaks during a rally for Republican presidential nominee and former U.S. President Donald Trump at Madison Square Garden, in New York, U.S., Oct. 27, 2024.
Andrew Kelly | Reuters
After the announcement of White’s addition to the board on Monday, employees also posted criticism, questions and jokes on Workplace, according to posts reviewed by CNBC.
White, who has led UFC since 2001, became embroiled in controversy in 2023 after a video published by TMZ showed him slapping his wife at a New Year’s Eve party in Mexico. White issued a public apology, and his wife, Anne White, issued a statement to TMZ, calling it an isolated incident.
Commenters on Workplace made jokes asking whether performance reviews would now involve mixed martial arts style fights.
In addition to White, John Elkann, the CEO of Italian auto holding company Exor, was named to Meta’s board.
Some employees asked what value autos and entertainment executives could bring to Meta, and whether White’s addition reflects the company’s values. One post suggested the new board appointments would help with political alliances that could be valuable but could also change the company culture in unintended or unwanted ways.
Comments in Workplace alluding to White’s personal history were flagged and removed from the discussion, according to posts from the internal app read by CNBC.
An employee who said he was with Meta’s Internal Community Relations team, posted a reminder to Workplace about the company’s “community engagement expectations” policy, or CEE, for using the platform.
“Multiple comments have been flagged by the community for review,” the employee posted. “It’s important that we maintain a respectful work environment where people can do their best work.”
The internal community relations team member added that “insulting, criticizing, or antagonizing our colleagues or Board members is not aligned with the CEE.”
Several workers responded to that note saying that even respectful posts, if critical, had been removed, amounting to a corporate form of censorship.
One worker said that because critical comments were being removed, the person wanted to voice support for “women and all voices.”
Meta declined to comment.
— CNBC’s Salvador Rodriguez contributed to this report.
Bitcoin slumped on Tuesday as a spike in Treasury yields weighed on risk assets broadly.
The price of the flagship cryptocurrency was last lower by 4.8% at $97,183.80, according to Coin Metrics. The broader market of cryptocurrencies, as measured by the CoinDesk 20 index, dropped more than 5%.
The moves followed a sudden increase in the 10-year U.S. Treasury yield after data released by the Institute for Supply Management reflected faster-than-expected growth in the U.S. services sector in December, adding to concerns about stickier inflation. Rising yields tend to pressure growth oriented risk assets.
Bitcoin traded above $102,000 on Monday and is widely expected to about double this year from that level. Investors are hopeful that clearer regulation will support digital asset prices and in turn benefit stocks like Coinbase and Robinhood.
However, uncertainty about the path of Federal Reserve interest rate cuts could put bumps in the road for crypto prices. In December, the central bank signaled that although it was cutting rates a third time, it may do fewer rate cuts in 2025 than investors had anticipated. Historically, rate cuts have had a positive effect on bitcoin price while hikes have had a negative impact.
Bitcoin is up more than 3% since the start of the year. It posted a 120% gain for 2024.
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