After Afterpay

Plus: Big Tech Doing Finance, European Banks, Blackstone

Welcome to another issue of Net Interest, where I distill 25 years of experience investing in the financial sector into a weekly email. If you’re reading this but haven’t yet signed up, join over 22,000 others and get Net Interest delivered to your inbox each Friday by subscribing here 👉

After Afterpay

Well, I said last week that I would be taking some time off over August. But this is a newsletter on financial sector themes, so when the biggest financial sector deal of the year is announced, it’s worth getting off the beach for!

Earlier this week, Square announced that it’s buying Afterpay of Australia in a deal (now) worth US$33 billion. We’ve touched on both companies here before – Afterpay in Online Lending: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly precisely a year ago (Afterpay was the Good) and Square in a write-up of the company (Hip to be Square) just before Christmas. They are both at the vanguard of fintech and share a distinctive feature. Unlike many fintech startups which create a lot…