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Capital One to acquire Brex for $5.15B

reuters.com

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Re: Capital One to acquire Brex for $5.15B

#181

Post by john01dav »

mise_en_place wrote: post #149
verdverm wrote: post #14

They refused my business because I didn't have SV VC money Chase got it instead, but they are losing it next month because of their shenanigans and greed Wish crypto hadn't been co-opted by the same people and worse

I'd recommend US Bank.

I have a credit card with them for cash back on utilities, and their customer service is awful. For example it takes a lenghty phone call to do anything, in contrast to my primary bank where I can just leave a written message in a minute or so and they respond asynchronously. I also heard from someone who worked with US bank for institutional banking services that they're just as awful there, as well as frequently causing problems for this person's employer's customers, who were mostly low income.

Re: Capital One to acquire Brex for $5.15B

#182

Post by mkozlows »

rvz wrote: post #17
paxys wrote: post #13

Sold for $5.15B. Brex last raised $300M in Oct 2021 at a $12.3B valuation.

That is a 50% discount, which isn't great for those who got into the latest round. Seems like Capital One is very excited on the deal and announced it earlier while Brex hid the announcement and made it hard to find. (It's on the Brex [0] journal directory, but you cannot see it featured on its front page) What (really) happened? [0] https://www.brex.com/journal

I mean, welcome to literally every tech startup valuation 2021 vs now. 2021 was so amazing for stock valuations.

Re: Capital One to acquire Brex for $5.15B

#184

Post by csomar »

mise_en_place wrote: post #149
verdverm wrote: post #14

They refused my business because I didn't have SV VC money Chase got it instead, but they are losing it next month because of their shenanigans and greed Wish crypto hadn't been co-opted by the same people and worse

I'd recommend US Bank.

US Bank is way behind in tech though. You need to get in touch with one of their agents for anything. Like I'd love to have a human agent when I need one but for regular tasks, I'd rather use a Web or Mobile App that let me figure things out.

Re: Capital One to acquire Brex for $5.15B

#185

Post by prattmic »

hibikir wrote: post #152
maest wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How come this is not a problem in Europe? Credit cards make same promises there, but usage is greatly diminished.

A very big percentage of credit card expenses in the US come from cards with rewards programs, so you get money/gift cards/travel discounts in exchange for using the credit card instead of the debit card. A lot of this is funded from much higher interchange fees: It's ultimately the merchant you buy from funding most of the rewards. Since those very high fees are nowadays illegal in the EU, European credit cards cann…

How does this work when using a US credit card in the EU? I assume the merchant still pays the lower interchange fee, so are the banks just betting that customers won’t do a large proportion of spending abroad?

Re: Capital One to acquire Brex for $5.15B

#186

Post by pitaj »

pants2 wrote: post #110
thegrim000 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's extremely common advice to not keep large sums of cash sitting in your checking account. With capital one (and others) you can just open a free savings account, keep the bulk in there (if you don't want to invest it instead), which earns an actual interest, and then there's never a "big" amount of vulnerable cash sitting in your checking account. There's free/instant transfers between savings and checking when y…

Not a great solution to constantly have to top up your checking account with some amount between "I need this much to pay my bills" and "losing this amount would devastating" which for many people has quite some overlap

You can pay bills from your savings account with ACH in the US.

Re: Capital One to acquire Brex for $5.15B

#187

Post by janzer »

leugim wrote: post #180
gorbachev wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SMB? ICP?

SMB = Small Business Owner ICP = Ideal Customer Profile

Just to avoid confusion, while SMB as used above may be referring to the owner it typically means "Small and/or Medium Business". Where what counts as small and medium varies a bit but is generally <500 employees and annual revenue <$10 million.

Re: Capital One to acquire Brex for $5.15B

#188

Post by pell »

bflesch wrote: post #45
testfrequency wrote: post #30

Does this mean Stripe is worth $1B?

Stripe has for years helped non-EU companies to do tax fraud in the EU, and in a just world their management would be charged. Every time a customer in the EU pays with Stripe, they exactly know if they are a private customer or not and in which country that customer is located in. Stripe also knows who the counterparty is ("their merchant"). Yet Stripe systematically enabled their merchants to avoid paying appropria…

Stripe never claimed to handle tax however. Merchants have to handle tax on their own. This is no different than accepting cash or using a card terminal in your shop. The payment processor does not handle your tax for you.

Re: Capital One to acquire Brex for $5.15B

#189

Post by nokun7 »

That's less than half of Brex's crazy $12.3 billion peak back in 2022.

But honestly, it’s still one of the biggest fintech deals ever and actually gives people real money in a market where most unicorns are just stuck. The founders are reportedly splitting about $1 billion each, early investors (2017-2018) are getting 12-80x returns, and YC’s tiny $120k seed turned into ~$100 million (800x, insane TBH). Even later folks (especially the 2021-2022 crowd) are breaking even (at least) or getting a little upside thanks to some 2024 RSU top-ups.

Re: Capital One to acquire Brex for $5.15B

#190

Post by what »

tecleandor wrote: post #123
xp84 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Frame of reference: US only) That's a shame, given 18-25 is just the age where a credit card skimmer or online card fraud causing a big fraudulent withdrawal from your checking account, and weeks of waiting to get it back, could be devastating. This has happened to people in my family (likely from gas stations) but we only use credit cards except to pull cash from ATMs, so we only suffer a temporary dip in our avail…

That's way less common in Europe. Most places are chip and pin or NFC and that limits skimming quite a lot.

How so? My card was skimmed and I had only tapped it in maybe a half dozen locations. Never swiped it or inserted it anywhere or used it online.
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