👉Background: Afterpay announced its big acquisition by Block (aka Square) last year and the deal was completed this Feb. Since then, the company has been dealing with the buy-now-pay-later dive, with  losses up more than 300% in April.

👉 What happened: Now Afterpay has announced  its banking app Money by Afterpay will close in October 2022 (after being live for just 12 months).

👉 What else: We don’t know how many people are using Money by Afterpay or how much money it's managing… But we do know that the shutdown has a whole lot to do with the fact that Block also runs Cash App - a similar app with 45 million users in the US.

What's the key learning?

💡When a company makes an acquisition, it clearly has its eye on something particular within that business. It may want to snap up the employees, the data, the brand, the licences or the customers.

💡But sometimes not all of the parts of the acquired biz fits within the vision of the new parent company. Square certainly isn't the only company to switch up the strategy at a company it acquired.

💡Just think of the chaos after Warner Media merged with Discovery this year. CNN+ was shut down 3 weeks after launch and the Batgirl movie that had already been filmed got axed. But both these companies say they’ve gotta make sacrifices like this for the greater good - aka ‘long-term strategy’.

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