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As Twitter continues its absolutely farcical march toward its own demise, we are grabbing the popcorn to watch the fire blaze. In other news: Happy Monday, folks! — Christine and Haje
Super.com, formerly Snapcommerce, launched its cash-back card SuperCash last October so that card users could build credit, amassing 5 million customers worldwide who have collectively saved over $150 million to date, according to CEO Hussein Fazal. Now it has its sights set on helping “everyday Americans” find deals and savings across multiple categories, including travel and shopping, via its super app, Christine reports.
Silicon Valley’s quest to automate everything is unceasing, which explains its latest obsession: Auto-GPT. In essence, Auto-GPT uses the versatility of OpenAI’s latest AI models to interact with software and services online, allowing it to “autonomously” perform tasks like X and Y. But as we are learning with large language models, this capability seems to be as wide as an ocean but as deep as a puddle, Kyle reports.
Go on, another handful for ya:
Do you remember P2P lending and on-demand insurance? If not, there’s a good reason: Despite a lot of hype, they’re just two of several fintech innovations that fizzled over the last decade.
For his latest TC+ column, fintech consultant Grant Easterbrook examined three more ideas “that initially seemed promising, but largely failed to change the financial services industry.”
According to Easterbrook, these misfires offer valuable lessons to today’s founders and investors: “Fintech entrepreneurs must remember the essential principle that the average consumer doesn’t like thinking about money and often wants someone else to take care of it.”
Three more from the TC+ team:
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Merchants have a lot of things to deal with when it comes to running their businesses, but Shopify wants to take one thing off their plate. Shopify is working with B2B payments provider Melio to add direct bill payments so that they can consolidate invoices and pay their bills in a more automated way via Shopify’s platform. Mary Ann writes that this is the e-commerce platform’s “bid to be a single-stop fintech for merchants.”
Ring, ring…guess who’s calling? It’s PhonePe, and the company is out to challenge Google’s dominance in India with an app store of its own. The Walmart-backed company is offering a “premiere experience for millions of users with high-quality advertisements and custom targeting, support for 12 languages and 24×7 live chat,” Manish reports.
And we have five more for you:
Source @TechCrunch
