Mark Matousek

The Padres were once the most promising team in baseball. Now, their future looks bleak.

Affirm revenue jumped 48% year over year, to $591 million, in the October to December period, as the company charged higher interest rates on its installment loans. Interest income rose 86%, to $288 million, far outpacing growth in revenue from what…

Plaid has hired its first president, Jen Taylor, in a sign that the company is preparing for an initial public offering. Taylor was previously Cloudflare’s chief product officer and had worked for Salesforce, Meta Platforms and Adobe before that. In…

PayPal said it expected earnings to drop this year as it continues to work on reining in costs, sending its shares down around 8% in after hours trading on Wednesday. PayPal CEO Alex Chriss, who joined the company in September, has made streamlining…

Briefing Klarna launched a subscription service on Wednesday that eliminates fees users pay on some purchases and offers extra rewards points and discounts. The service, called Klarna Plus, costs $7.99 per month. The app is part of the buy now, pay…

One of the pandemic-era darlings of the fintech sector is stuck in a rut. Brex, which issues credit cards and manages cash for businesses, burned an average of about $17 million a month in cash in the fourth quarter, the company told staff at an…

Discord, the chat app, is laying off 17% of its staff, or 170 people, according to a person familiar with the matter. The news follows an August layoff and a string of job cuts across large tech firms including Google. Discord isn’t the only social…

Circle has confidentially filed for an initial public offering, the company said on Thursday, signaling the stablecoin issuer is taking another run at becoming a publicly traded firm after a special purpose acquisition deal fell apart in 2022. Circle…

Affirm was among last year’s top stock market performers, as the company narrowed its losses and investors cheered deals with Amazon and Walmart that expanded the lender’s reach with shoppers. That marked a dramatic rebound from 2022, when rising…

An analysis of the strategies the fintech companies Affirm and Klarna used to move toward profitability.

Google Pay will add the “buy now, pay later” providers Affirm and Zip as payment options for some merchants next year, Affirm and Zip said on Wednesday. Google Pay users with Android phones will be able to select Affirm or Zip as a payment option…

Amazon is removing Venmo as a payment option next month, according to Venmo’s website. The retail giant alerted customers to the change on Wednesday via email, according to NorthJersey.com. Amazon will reportedly continue to accept Venmo-branded…

The financial regulator, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, on Wednesday urged banks that make “buy now, pay later” loans to ensure they’re managing the risks associated with the loans and offering fair terms to borrowers. The OCC…

New PayPal CEO Alex Chriss is fast-tracking an effort to bolster the company’s defenses against Stripe and Apple Pay, highlighting how the payments giant has fallen behind newer, slicker competitors. Teams across the payments giant have been racing…

SoFi told customers on Wednesday that it’s shutting down its crypto trading service, which had been under mounting scrutiny from bank regulators. SoFi, which offers lending and a range of other services, received a bank charter last year, putting it…

Co-founders of the defunct social media app IRL sued SoftBank and two other investors on Wednesday, alleging that the startup’s shutdown in June was the result of false claims spread by the investors that most of IRL’s users were fake. The IRL…

Almost no startup benefited more from the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank than Brex, which saw a surge in deposits from young companies who use its credit card and cash management products. But that growth spurt has petered out in recent months,…

Robinhood returned to losing money in the third quarter, after posting its first quarterly profit in the second quarter of this year. The trading app lost $85 million between July and September, compared with a $25 million profit between April and…

Klarna was profitable on an operating basis in the third quarter, the company said on Monday, the first time the buy now, pay later firm has posted a quarterly operating profit since 2019. The company’s operating profit totaled around $12 million…

PayPal named Jamie Miller as its new CFO on Wednesday. Miller previously held the same role at the accounting firm EY for just five months, resigning in June after the company canceled its plan to spin off its consulting business, whose finance…