Tyler Crowe

We have publicly traded Alphabet today with a lot of large language models and the lay of the land here today.

Guys, of these artificial intelligence companies, which one as an investment interests you the most?

Coming up next, we're going to talk about the evolution of the buy now, pay later landscape.

We are by no means a breaking news sort of podcast.

But I think there was a press release from Klarna that actually came out this morning.

So it's probably the closest we've ever come to breaking news on the Motley Fool Monday podcast.

But we thought this would be a great jumping off point to discuss the buy now, pay later landscape, because it was something that came out and was very topical and really relates to how this industry has been evolving.

A couple of months ago, buy now, pay later company Klarna rolled out a membership program in Europe, talking about membership tiers and various perks that you could get to it.

This morning, the company announced it was bringing more or less the exact same structure of those membership tiers to the United States.

In the press release, they mentioned some of the membership program perks that they have, like

airport lounge access spending perks like cash back and even a 16 gram rose gold looking not not a credit card but a 16 gram rose gold card so whatever that's supposed to be called in the future

Matt, I'm trying to figure out what's going on here, because Buy Now, Pay Later was supposed to be not credit cards.

This sounds like credit cards.

What are they doing here, and what is the point of what they're doing here?

John, I'm maybe reiterating my old guy shouts at cloud question here, but this is what I struggle with this a little bit.

We were just talking about 2% of payment volume is buy now, pay later.

Credit cards are pretty much the dominant payment way of doing things.

Top-end clarinet subscriptions over $500 a year, you get credit card-like perks.

Other buy-now-pay-later companies like Sezzle also have membership tiers with various perks.

It really seems to me like buy-now-pay-later is doing their best to look more and more like credit cards.