The changes are designed to enhance the consumer experience of using Google Pay and make it a more competitive option against other payment methods.
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As eBay continues to invest in the trading card space, the e-commerce company announced Wednesday three significant commercial transactions with Collectors, the parent company of PSA (Professional Sports Authenticator), the third-party authentication and grading provider in the collectibles industry.
The transactions include a trading card commercial agreement that aims to provide trading enthusiasts a seamless buying, selling, grading and storage experience. As part of the partnership, eBay and PSA plan to introduce a “customer-centric product experience” over the coming months. Plus, PSA is launching a new service for customers to list trading cards on eBay as soon as the card is graded in order to accelerate the selling process.
Additionally, eBay acquired Collectors’ auction house Goldin, a significant move that will greatly benefit collectors. The sale helps eBay expand the range of inventory for buyers as well as give Goldin sellers a wider audience.
eBay is also selling the eBay vault to Collectors, creating a new offering that merges the existing vault services. Launched in 2022, the eBay vault allows collectors to store trading cards that are valued at more than $750 in a secure, temperature-controlled vault.
The financial terms of the deals weren’t publicly disclosed. All three transactions are anticipated to close simultaneously in the second quarter of 2024.
“The deals announced today further our mission of reinventing the future of e-commerce for enthusiasts, and we are excited to partner with PSA to offer a simpler, more personalized experience for passionate collectors,” eBay CEO Jamie Iannone said in a statement. “PSA is a premier player in trading cards and collectibles with unmatched capabilities, and we believe our shared expertise will inspire even more people to sell, shop, and collect with confidence.”
Wednesday’s announcement comes four months after eBay partnered with sports trading card company COMC, which allowed eBay customers to easily digitize their inventory.
Last year, the company bought collectibles platform TCGplayer for $295 million.
Klarna is launching its credit card in the United States, the Swedish fintech giant told TechCrunch in an exclusive interview.
“It was one of our most asked for products,” said David Fock, Klarna’s chief product officer, “and will allow people to pay in the Klarna way but with a card.”
By “Klarna way,” Fock means in installments. While the company’s offerings have evolved over the years, it started out as a buy now, pay later business, giving consumers a way to spread out payments over time.
Klarna launched a credit card in the EU several years ago but this will be the first time consumers in the U.S. can apply for one.
With the Klarna credit card, the company is now competing with the likes of Apple and more recently, Robinhood as well as rival BNPL player Affirm in offering a credit card in the United States. It is partnering with Salt Lake City-based WebBank in the effort. There is no annual fee for the card, and no foreign transaction fees.
Users can earn up to 10% cash back on selected merchants when using the card in its app and the card integrates with the company’s AI assistant to find deals on planned purchases, he said. Klarna’s virtual Visa card is compatible with Google and Apple Pay.
For now, people can apply to be on a waitlist for the card, which will be rolling out in coming months. Customers can pay for purchases either in stores or online. They will have the option after the fact to spread out the payments for a larger purchase across 3 to 6 months, with an interest rate of 33.9%. Or, they can extend the due date by one month, also paying 33.9% on that purchase. While that interest rate isn’t unheard of for BNPL offerings (though it can be far lower), it is high compared to typical credit cards, which tend to be closer to 30% at the high end, according to Nerdwallet.
“We want to offer payment option flexibility but we don’t want it to be like a credit card that builds revolving credit for consumers,” Fock told TechCrunch. “We see it as a problem that the credit card debt in the U.S. is hitting record levels, and we believe our options are healthier and more sustainable.”
Affirm’s debit card also provides consumers with the flexibility to pay upfront or request to pay over time via the Affirm app. And Apple too gives the option to pay in installments (though Apple’s APR taps out at 29.49%). Where Affirm differs from BNPL cards issued by competitors is that Affirm underwrites transactions made using its debit card, according to Affirm’s head of product, Vishal Kapoor.
Like other credit cards, or other Klarna BNPL options, if users pay off their balances before they are due, they’ll avoid paying interest, Fock says. “Our customers are typically looking for the free option,” he said. “We really want this to be an extension of how customers are used to using Klarna.”
Naturally, Klarna will earn interchange revenue as well as any interest collected.
The Stockholm-based company has seen success in expanding to the U.S., telling TechCrunch in February of 2023 that the country was its biggest market by revenue. (As of last November that momentum had continued with Klarna saying it had over 37 million users in the country alone). Today, Klarna said the U.S. and Germany represent its largest markets but that “the US is gaining all the time and is often largest on a quarterly basis.”
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Eight months after acquiring credit card startup X1 for $95 million, Robinhood announced today the launch of its new Gold Card, with a list of features that could even give Apple Card users envy.
Robinhood, better known for its brokerage app aimed at the everyday investor, is touting all sorts of benefits with its new card in an attempt to attract users. The card has no annual or foreign transaction fees. However, it will only be available for Robinhood Gold members, which costs $5 a month, or $50 annually. (Gold is a program that offers other benefits like 5% APY on an account’s uninvested brokerage cash.)
Gold Card users can earn 3% cash back on all categories, including restaurants and groceries, and 5% cash bank when booking travel at Robinhood’s new travel portal. That cash back can be transferred to brokerage accounts, which can go toward making investments like stock purchases, the company says. The ability to invest using cash back is the big innovation that X1 developed prior to getting acquired.
Another interesting feature of the Gold Card includes the ability to provide cards for family members. This is the first time that Robinhood has introduced a family-oriented financial product, Robinhood Money General Manager Deepak Rao told TechCrunch. Rao was the founder and CEO of X1 before joining Robinhood in the acquisition.
Users will have the ability to add up to five family members as cardholders to their account with every cardholder receiving their own card. Additional cardholders can be any age, giving parents a way to help teens build credit and monitor spending. The ability to provide cards to family members will extend even to those visiting from other countries.
“A user can provide cards to parents, children or caregivers and set the right kind of controls and protection, while also helping them build their credit,” Rao said. “They don’t have to provide any other information than their name and date of birth and Social Security number if they have one. If you’re worried about spending limits, you can put a dollar amount limit and also a child-safe mode for kids.”
The Card also allows users to create and delete virtual cards for one-time purchases and will have an APR of 20.24% – 29.99%, which Robinhood said will vary with the market based on the Prime Rate.
Robinhood is also making its physical cards numberless so if they are lost or stolen, users won’t have to swap out all their card information. The company is also launching a new app to go along with the new Gold Card that will be completely separate from its investment app, Rao said.
Generally, the Gold account offers up to $2.25 million FDIC insurance from a network of partner banks.
Robinhood’s entrance into the credit card market is clearly taking a cue from the likes of Apple, which has seen great success with its own card (despite hiccups with its partnership with Goldman Sachs). By forgoing hidden fees like annual or late fees, and by applying its cash back daily, Apple Card topped more than 12 million users as of January.
Many cards offer cash back but often restrict it to certain categories. This card is generous in its cash-back offer. Apple, for instance, offers 3% cash back on all purchases made at Apple, and on purchases made at select merchants when using the Apple Card with Apple Pay. In general, purchases made on Apple Card with Apple Pay earn users 2% back. But Apple also offers a Family Sharing feature, and a high-yield savings account offering 4.5% interest.
Obviously, Robinhood will earn interchange revenue from the credit cards, standard transaction fees paid by the merchants. It has earned interchange revenue off of its debit cards, which launched in 2018. Coastal Community Bank is Robinhood’s banking partner on the new Gold Card.
The new credit card is part of Robinhood’s evolving business model and offerings over the years. In December of 2022, the company announced Robinhood Retirement, which it described as the “first and only” individual retirement account (IRA) with a 1% match on every eligible dollar contributed. Gold Membership, a requirement to get the Gold Card, increases the eligible match to up to 3% match.
“There’s always been special perks and opportunities reserved for the wealthy that make them even richer. It’s why we started Robinhood…” Robinhood co-founder and CEO Vlad Tenev said in a written statement. “Today’s announcements…bring us one step closer to the goal of giving everyone better access to the financial system.”
You must be a Robinhood Gold card member.
You must first meet the following credentials in order to apply for a card:
You must be a Robinhood Gold member to apply for the card. It costs $5 a month, or $50 a year, to become a Robinhood Gold member.
Are there foreign transaction fees associated with a Robinhood Gold Card?
No, there are no foreign transaction fees.
Robinhood doesn’t do a hard pull on your credit until you accept the card offer.
Is Robinhood Gold FDIC insured?
Robinhood offers up to $2.25 million in FDIC insurance through a network of partner banks.
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This post was originally published March 26 at 4 p.m. PT, and has been updated to include Robinhood’s stream and additional remarks.
Hey, folks, welcome to Week in Review (WiR), TechCrunch’s newsletter recapping the notable happenings in tech over the past few days.
This week, TC’s auto reporter Sean O’Kane revealed how EV startup Fisker temporarily lost track of millions of dollars in customer payments as it scaled up deliveries, leading to an internal audit that started in December and took months to complete.
Elsewhere, Lorenzo reported how Facebook snooped on users’ Snapchat traffic in a secret project known internally at Meta as “Project Ghostbusters.” According to court documents, the goal was to intercept and decrypt the network traffic between people using Snapchat’s app and its servers.
And Manish wrote about the resignation of Stability AI founder and CEO Emad Mostaque late last week. Mostaque’s departure from Stability AI — the startup known for its popular image generation tool Stable Diffusion — comes amid an ongoing struggle for stability (pun intended) at the company, which was reportedly spending ~$8 million a month as of October 2023 with little revenue to show for it.
Lots else happened. We recap it all in this edition of WiR — but first, a reminder to sign up to receive the WiR newsletter in your inbox every Saturday.
Fisker suspended: Fisker’s bad week continued with a halt in the startup’s stock trading. The New York Stock Exchange moved to take Fisker off the exchange, citing its “abnormally low” stock levels.
AI-powered itineraries: In an upgrade to its Search Generative Experience, Google has added the ability for users to ask Google Search to plan a travel itinerary. Using AI, Search will draw on ideas from websites around the web along with reviews, photos and other details.
Robinhood’s new card: Nine months after acquiring credit card startup X1 for $95 million, Robinhood on Wednesday announced the launch of its new Gold Card, powered by X1’s technology, with a list of features that could make Apple Card users envious.
At AT&T, mum’s the word: The personal information of some 73 million AT&T customers spilled online this week. But AT&T won’t say how — despite the hack responsible having happened over three years ago.
Booming Copilot: Copilot, the budgeting app, has raised $6 million in a Series A round led by Nico Wittenborn’s Adjacent. The app is benefiting partly from the death of Mint, Intuit’s financial management product.
Liquid assets: In a piece looking at the wider VC-backed beverage industry, Rebecca and Christine note canned water startup Liquid Death’s recent $67 million fundraise, which brought the company’s total raised to more than $267 million. Talk about liquidity.
HVAC venture: Dan Laufer, a former Nextdoor exec, has raised $25 million from Canvas Ventures and others for PipeDreams, a startup that acquires mom-and-pop HVAC and plumbing companies and scales them using its software that helps with scheduling and marketing.
Is Nvidia the next AWS?: Ron writes about how there’s lots of parallels in Nvidia’s and AWS’ growth trajectories.
This week on Equity, the crew dug into Robinhood’s new credit card, Fisker’s latest woes and even Databricks’ new AI model that it spent $10 million to spin up. They also spotlit two companies building startups focused around kids, and, to wrap up, looked at a new $100 million fund that seeks to back innovative climate tech.
Meanwhile, on Found, Allison Wolff, the co-founder and CEO of Vibrant Planet, a cloud-based planning and monitoring tool for adaptive land management, discussed why the wildfires we’re seeing today are hotter and spreading more quickly than we can contain and how proper land management can help foster lower, slower-burning fires.
And on Chain Reaction, Jacquelyn interviewed Scott Dykstra, CTO and co-founder of Space and Time. Space and Time aims to be a verifiable compute layer for web3 that scales zero-knowledge proofs, a cryptographic action used to prove something about a piece of data without revealing the origin data itself.
Spotify tests online learning: In its ongoing efforts to get its 600 million+ users to spend more time and money on its platform, Spotify is spinning up a new line of content: e-learning. Beginning with a rollout in the U.K., the (traditionally audio) streaming platform is testing the waters for an online education offering of freemium video courses.
Welcome to TechCrunch Fintech (formerly The Interchange)! This week, we’re looking at Robinhood’s new Gold Card, challenges in the BaaS space and how a tiny startup caught Stripe’s eye.
To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important fintech stories delivered to your inbox every Sunday at 7:30 a.m. PT, subscribe here.
Robinhood took the wraps off its new Gold Card last week to much fanfare. It has a long list of impressive features, including 3% cash back and the ability to invest that cash back via the company’s brokerage account. A user can also put that cash back into Robinhood’s savings account, which offers 5% APY. We’re curious to see how this new card will impact the company’s bottom line. But also, we are fascinated by how Robinhood incorporated the technology it acquired when buying startup X1 last summer for $95 million and turned it into a potentially very lucrative new offering.
The banking-as-a-service (BaaS) space is facing challenges. BaaS startup Synctera recently conducted a restructuring that affects about 15% of employees. The startup is not the only VC-backed BaaS company to have resorted to layoffs to preserve cash over the past year. Treasury Prime, Synapse and Figure have as well. Meanwhile, according to American Banker, the FDIC announced consent orders against Sutton Bank and Piermont Bank, telling them “to keep a closer eye on their fintechs’ compliance with the Bank Secrecy Act and money laundering rules.”
PayPal Ventures’ latest investment is in Qoala, an Indonesian startup that provides personal insurance products covering a variety of risks, including accidents and phone screen damage. MassMutual Ventures also participated in Qoala’s new $47 million round of funding.
New Retirement, a Mill Valley–based company building software to help people create financial retirement plans, has raised $20 million in a tranche of funding.
We last checked in on Zaver, a Swedish B2C buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) provider in Europe, when it raised a $5 million funding round in 2021. The company has now closed a $10 million extension to its Series A funding round, bringing its total Series A to $20 million.
Read all about how a tiny four-person startup, Supaglue, caught Stripe’s eye. Supaglue, formerly known as Supergrain, is an open source developer platform for user-facing integrations. The team is going to help Stripe on real-time analytics and reporting across its platform and third-party apps for its Revenue and Finance Automation suite.
Maju Kuruvilla is no longer CEO of one-click checkout company Bolt. He is replaced by Justin Grooms, Bolt’s global head of sales, who is now interim CEO. Kuruvilla, the former Amazon executive, took over as CEO in January 2022 after founder Ryan Breslow stepped down. The Information has more about Bolt’s woes here.
Inside Mercury’s stumble from fintech hero to target of the feds
RealPage and Plaid team to curb rental fraud
In HR software battle, Rippling makes up ground against Deel — at a cost
Is Chime ready for an IPO? It has more primary customers than Chase
Inside a CEO’s bold claims about her hot fintech startup, which TC previously covered here.
Cloverleaf raises $7.3M in Series A extension
Want to reach out with a tip? Email me at maryann@techcrunch.com or send me a message on Signal at 408.204.3036. You can also send a note to the whole TechCrunch crew at tips@techcrunch.com. For more secure communications, click here to contact us, which includes SecureDrop (instructions here) and links to encrypted messaging apps.
Robinhood’s new credit card was revealed Tuesday, and though it’s only available for Robinhood Gold members, the Gold Card does have a feature that’s spurring headlines: the ability to invest cash-back bonuses into investments.
The announcement comes eight months after the acquisition of the startup X1 for $95 million, and it just so happens one of X1’s biggest features was the ability to invest cash-back benefits. Coincidence? Obviously not! Robinhood is hoping that bonus, plus a slew of other perks, including the ability to add family members as cardholders, even if they’re young or without a Social Security number, will be enough to pull customers away from Apple’s pull.
But what gives with tech companies getting into the consumer credit game? You could argue that Robinhood’s choice to offer a card is just an extension of its already expanding portfolio of financial products. But Apple also has a card, recall. And the tech giant is getting deeper into the realm of personal finance as time goes along.
Tech companies expanding their product remit over time is not new — hell, I wrote about it back in 2014 — but it’s notable to see how day to day consumer finance is becoming a technology story. Hit the clip, let’s chat!
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