Klarna aims to halve workforce with AI-driven gains | Hacker News Reader

Klarna aims to halve workforce with AI-driven gains

ft.com

14 pointscroes4 comments

I'm just... Incredibly suspicious of this. I've just this week received an email from Klarna that "effective October 10th, 2024, JPMorgan Chase will no longer allow customers to make Klarna payments using their JPMorgan Chase credit cards."

Surely this can't be a coincidence. Two points I think: one, it just doesn't pass the smell test that you can cut half your staff and magically become more efficient (yes, Twitter, but they're not doing so hot from a valuation perspective)... Especially in FinTech?? And two, it really seems like they're using "AI" hype to obfuscate this fact from folks that don't really understand it's practical implications, in the face of a spiralling business.

This may sound like conspiracy theory but often this is exactly how corporations work - especially the highly visible ones. While I am not saying the reasons point by this person are exactly the reason but there's no reason to believe things aren't souring somewhere else in the company.

This is what the PR department is for. When something in one part of the company goes bad and could be publicly visible, the CEO asks head of PR to funnel a positive story across various channels. You identify these PR-only messages by seeing if it is backed by data or by fluff.

Remember the Amazon PR about saving 4500 years of dev time - yeah riiigghhthtt.

>"effective October 10th, 2024, JPMorgan Chase will no longer allow customers to make Klarna payments using their JPMorgan Chase credit cards."

This is due to multiple federal regulators and consumer advocacy groups recently pointing out that paying credit cards (and Buy Now Pay Later IS functionally equivalent to a credit card no matter what they claim about being "FiNtEcH" or some other bullshit) with credit cards is frowned upon, to say the least.

Nothing more, nothing less.

edit: got some rye in me so I just wanted to point out how awesome the world would be if everyone who uses "Fintech" unironically was entombed in a salt mine for the rest of time.

https://archive.is/9wu5x

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