Affirm at Goldman Sachs Conference: Expanding in BNPL Market

On Tuesday, 09 September 2025, Affirm Holdings Inc (NASDAQ:AFRM) presented at the Goldman Sachs Communicopia + Technology Conference 2025. The company outlined its strategic initiatives in the Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) space, emphasizing growth and innovation while addressing challenges. CEO Max Levchin highlighted Affirm’s commitment to consumer-friendly practices and its expansion plans.

Key Takeaways

• Affirm is GAAP-profitable and experiencing over 30% growth.
• The company has underwritten 50 million Americans, with 23 million active U.S. users.
• Affirm’s merchant-funded 0% installment offers grew by over 90% last quarter.
• Expansion plans include entering new geographies and enhancing e-commerce penetration.
• The Affirm Card is growing naturally, contributing to an expanded market presence.

Financial Results

• Affirm is currently profitable under GAAP standards.
• The company is achieving growth rates exceeding 30%.
• Affirm’s penetration in the U.S. e-commerce market is in the mid-single digits.
• There has been a significant increase in merchant-funded 0% installment offers, with growth over 90% in the last quarter.

Operational Updates

• Affirm has successfully underwritten more than 50 million Americans.
• The company boasts 23 million active users in the United States.
• The Affirm Card is experiencing growth through non-intrusive marketing strategies.
• Affirm is operational in the UK and plans to scale its growth in this market.
• A partnership with FIS aims to integrate the Affirm Card stack into existing debit cards.
• Transaction frequency has doubled since the company’s IPO.
• Approximately 98% of borrowers repay their loans.

Future Outlook

• Affirm aims to increase its presence in both e-commerce and overall commerce sectors.
• The company plans to expand geographically and create competitive moats with custom offers.
• Affirm remains focused on maintaining brand integrity and enhancing consumer credit scores through credit reporting.
• The potential of agented commerce and AI-driven shopping is being explored.
• Affirm intends to announce new bank partnerships through the FIS collaboration.

Q&A Highlights

• The evolution of the BNPL industry was discussed, with comparisons to American Express and private label credit cards.
• The growing trend of merchant-funded 0% installment offers was highlighted.
• Affirm’s approach to credit reporting, emphasizing the reporting of positive repayment behavior, was discussed.
• The growth of the Affirm Card and its impact on the company’s total addressable market were addressed.
• The potential for Affirm to become a regulated bank and its perspective on agented commerce were explored.

In conclusion, for a detailed understanding, readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - Goldman Sachs Communicopia + Technology Conference 2025:

Max Levchin, Founder and CEO, Affirm: We’ve distributed according to the market cap.

Will Nath, Analyst, Goldman Sachs: We’ll hope for the other end next time. All right. Thank you, everyone, for being here today. Will Nath, I cover payments in fintech here at Goldman Sachs. Joining us today, we’re very excited to have Max Levchin, Founder and CEO of Affirm. Max, thanks for being here again this year. My second opportunity to interview you here. We really appreciate your sponsorship of the conference.

Max Levchin, Founder and CEO, Affirm: Thank you. Good to be here.

Will Nath, Analyst, Goldman Sachs: All right. There’s been a lot of talk about buy now, pay later recently. I wanted to kick it off with a bigger picture question on Affirm. You’ve scaled Affirm into a profitable U.S. consumer platform. You’re putting up north of 30% growth. Merchants and consumers alike seem to be engaging with the product at an increasing rate. Higher transaction frequency with consumers, more merchant-sponsored offers to your customers. On top of that, the company is now GAAP-profitable. Where does Affirm go from here? What do you think the end state looks like?

Max Levchin, Founder and CEO, Affirm: Not enough time in the timer to describe the full vision of the world domination plan. The medium term is pretty easy to predict. There’s a lot still to do of what we’re doing. The current state of things is we are mid-single digits of e-commerce in the U.S., which is, you know, it’s meaningful. We have a real run for their money, so to say, to credit cards, but still a tiny minority relative to the overall e-commerce and certainly overall commerce. The current kind of the next few years, do more of the same, do it better, approve more users, get to more geographies, get more cards out there. Most importantly, continue sort of creating the moats that we have, which is this idea that we have custom offers for every individual walking through our checkouts in every market we play.

Making sure that our brand continues to stand for integrity, which is why consumers ultimately pick us. We don’t charge late fees, we don’t have compound interest. All of that is a reason to stay with Affirm, even as the conversation about BNPL increases.

Will Nath, Analyst, Goldman Sachs: That’s great. I want to broaden out the conversation to the entire market because BNPL is one of the first major changes in consumer spending patterns that we have seen. I want to pose two scenarios about how the industry will evolve and would love to hear your reaction. Scenario one, which I’ll call kind of closed loop V2 or the second coming of American Express. In this scenario, BNPL providers have significant user bases, independent of the card networks. They become a force to be reckoned with in payments. You’ve got a premium price, premium margins, and you have a differentiated customer experience around responsible credit. Merchants are willing to pay that price because of the AOV and conversion benefits that it generates. It’s a good version. Scenario two, which I’ll call the second coming of private label credit cards.

Here, retailers pit BNPL providers against each other in order to maximize the amount of credit they’re willing to provide. They negotiate larger profit-sharing arrangements with the lender, such that you’re basically ceding the economics and the customer relationships to the merchant. The financing solutions are basically interchangeable between providers. What do you think determines the way that BNPL breaks over time?

Max Levchin, Founder and CEO, Affirm: Certainly in favor of the former scenario. I think I can tell you why the latter is not likely to happen. If you look at the evolution of the private label credit card market, even that world has largely shifted to co-brands because the power of the network that Visa, MasterCard, whatever the actual card is issued on, is very powerful. Consumer utility is fundamentally at the root of whether you take up a card or not. The idea of you, sir, look like a Macy’s customer. Here’s a private Macy’s card. It only works here, but 10% off the next pair of pants was a good idea in the 1950s. It’s really sort of fully expired at this point. It’s long past the shelf sell-by date. I think co-brands, cards that feed loyalty and willingness to come back while offering a broader range of acceptance, is a good idea.

Obviously, BNPL is in some way inspired by it. We took it one step further, leveraging the fact that young consumers were very openly anti-revolving, anti-fees, anti-credit cards. What we offered was a viable alternative to a credit card, most importantly, the point of sale is your credit card that spoke to the idea of this card is for buying things that are costly. Paying over time is actually quite important versus just a pure convenience. The staying power in Affirm anyway is the custom deals, the ever multidimensional 0% reduced APR, et cetera, which is very hard to do with cards. Doing that through a card took us a very long time to get right. We’re still evolving our card product. I think most card issuers are sitting on software stacks that were designed roughly when private label cards were still a thing.

They’re really not optimized for the complexity that it takes to run the kind of business that we have. Long story short, I think the world is headed towards probably multiple, just because there’s never been a monopoly in payments, major networks that are sort of the new coming of American Express, as you put it, with, in our case, again, consumer-first notion of custom deals that are underwritten at every transaction that do expand into more permanent vehicles like cards. I think it’s very hard to see the power that, in our case, with underwritten 50+ million Americans, we have actives of 23+ million Americans just in this market alone. We operate in more than one market now. To a merchant, that value proposition really doesn’t sound like a, let’s get you a cool piece of plastic with your logo on it that only works here.

It sounds like, would you like to have another door that consumers like to walk through to transact with you? Putting up our logo is all about just getting more customers to say, yes, I will buy here.

Will Nath, Analyst, Goldman Sachs: I think a lot of the times when people talked about why it sets American Express, it was getting access to that customer base.

Max Levchin, Founder and CEO, Affirm: Exactly.

Loyalty is all important.

Will Nath, Analyst, Goldman Sachs: Do you find that merchants are giving you credit for the significant user base that you have built and the idea that you can get access to that?

Max Levchin, Founder and CEO, Affirm: Yes. The conversation has shifted from, do you think people will appreciate the offer and how much will it cost me, to, are you willing to tell your user base that we signed a contract together? You know, will you be willing to promote our 0% deal directly to the user base and things like that? It is very clear, just practically speaking, that our user base and the loyalty that it brings is an important component of merchant acceptance. We have to earn our right at the point of sale every single day. We are not just measured on, you have a big user base, but also how well does it convert? What are the approval rates? What’s the NPS or whatever customer satisfaction metric you want to use? It is very much like running a network.

Will Nath, Analyst, Goldman Sachs: Yeah, great. Okay. I wanted to maybe pivot to talk about the long-term view to maybe talk about competitive dynamics in the market. We’ve increasingly received the question around competition in the U.S. There’s the situation with Walmart earlier, as well as just a broad-based acceleration across the consumer lending category. Curious what you’re seeing on the ground from a competitive perspective and your view on whether or not the market is kind of heating up.

Max Levchin, Founder and CEO, Affirm: I think the market has always been very hot. I think there’s not been a, in my, at this point, professional lifetime in payments, I don’t remember the last time I thought to myself, finally, you know, it’s calm and I could just not care. We choose to compete on quality of the experience, on the quality of the offers that we give. We’re happy to be exclusive. We don’t need to be exclusive to win. For every Visa, there’s a MasterCard, and that tells you everything you want to know about payments and consumer choice. Whenever we end up being exclusive, we are able to focus a lot of our AI-powered tools on maximizing conversion, driving the offers exactly to the hands of the consumers that want them and would like them the most.

Just by being available at any checkout, we end up with more sales for that merchant, which again sort of speaks to the size of the network.

Will Nath, Analyst, Goldman Sachs: Great. One element of the story that’s gained a lot of traction and momentum in 2025 is the increase in merchant-funded 0% installment offers. Can you talk about why this is happening now and how much of it is kind of push versus pull between you and your merchant partners?

Max Levchin, Founder and CEO, Affirm: One of the things that’s really important to understand about Affirm, and I talked to it a little bit on the last earnings call, very few things at our scale and our complexity is a thing that happens overnight. Like we’re overnight success, 15 years in the making. We’re an overnight profitable company, having called out the exact month 12 months ago, etc. The 0% journey wasn’t a thing we said, oh, you know, we’ve got to do it. It started happening several years ago. First of all, we’ve been doing 0% offers since the very beginning of time. The story of our IPO was all about how many more Pelotons will people need to buy with no interest paid. Many, but there’s a lot more merchants now than that.

The thing that we realized a long time ago is that if you are good at underwriting, if your underwriting sophistication is really your core advantage, you can play with APRs as another tool for conversion. We funded some number of those long before we were public ourselves to see what we could learn about it. We built a whole discipline around how to measure it, how to optimize it, how to optimize it in real time. About two years ago, we basically said we can do this at an industrial scale. Any merchant we encounter, we can tell them here is the framing of the math that you need to buy into to believe that these dollars going in will result in marginal bottom line that you should be excited to fund. Anytime we’re challenged, we would be willing to put our money where our mouth is.

For some very short period of time, we will show you that we can fund it. Then it’s up to you if you want to take advantage of this opportunity or not. That took a few quarters with various conversations with merchants. The more merchants saw that we were doing this and doing it very successfully, the more of them came in and said, I don’t need proof. I’m ready to buy this. At this point, it’s shifted from us showing up and saying, no, we promise you, this is a very powerful way of deploying your marketing dollars. The math is obvious, superficially anyway. If you’re going to do a sale that really drives 30% more conversion, do you need to do 20% off, 25% off just from the sticker price? 25% is compelling. 10% is not.

To do a 0% over the course of a year, you’re talking sub 10% most of the time. Just on a pure dollar-to-dollar basis, don’t run a sale, run a 0% promotion with Affirm. You will have at least as good of a result, and that’s a good story. You have to have quarters and quarters of metrics that show that we actually know what we’re doing, that we’re not going to cannibalize credit cards. We’re not going to drive offers to people that don’t actually need them to commit and so on. At this point, we’ve gone from showing up with decks and saying, here’s how this works to fielding asks from merchants saying, hey, would you be ready to launch another promo with us because we need the support? It’s been going on for a long time. It’s now at scale.

Last quarter, we sort of came out and said, hey, it’s a big deal. The market completely misread it and said, oh, crap, these guys are funding growth. Like, no, we’re actually funding revenue. We’re funding growth, but the merchants are funding their own growth and we’re just helping them here. This quarter, we try to put a slightly more emphasis on the sort of mechanics of what’s going on behind the scenes. I think the market has got it right this time.

Will Nath, Analyst, Goldman Sachs: Yeah, I think the over 90% growth in zeros was really strong this quarter. I think part of that conversation is just, it seems like a very positive thing. You’ve seen an acceleration of volume. You’ve seen accelerated conversations and engagement with the merchants. People focus on the fact that the incremental economics are lower than your standard product. I think you did a good job of focusing on less credit density, higher quality customers. How do you think about zeros as kind of being additive to the growth algorithm versus like a substitute for the core product?

Max Levchin, Founder and CEO, Affirm: That’s what I meant by the amount of time we put in to make sure we optimize the economics of zeros wasn’t just making sure that when a merchant says, here’s the incremental dollar, put it towards zeros. By the way, I don’t want it to go to someone who is perfectly happy to buy without that. It is a form of discounting. The MDR goes up, the sales do go up, but did it have to go? We went through all that trouble, all the modeling and all the exercises. Obviously, at the same time, we made sure that we’re not giving away the farm from our side of the equation. The economics are slightly worse. They’re not tremendously worse. More importantly, they are truly incremental. The positive selection bias in credit is really powerful. Certainly, you know, Jamie Dimon’s in a record today that the economy is weakening.

It’s always good to come into a potentially weakening economy with a stronger backbook. You can think of that as a strengthening of the credit portfolio. It’s also, again, like I come back to the brand and sort of the commitment in the face of competition that our consumers are making to us. Anytime we offer a zero, like we’ve been saying this for 15 years, it’s always been true, but for the first maybe 10, people didn’t really believe us. When we say zero, there’s no asterisk because it can change. Even if you’re late, even if something happened to you and you need to take longer to pay us back, you’re still not paying any interest. Zero is the easiest number to understand. We build our brand and our consumer relationship over and over by saying, there’ll be no interest or the interest is fixed.

Here’s the number of dollars. Lo and behold, it doesn’t change. It takes a long time to create an impression and very little time to break it, obviously. We’re very, very focused on making sure that whatever deals we offer, especially the zero ones, as consumers say, I’ll give this thing a try, gives them the best possible experience. Zeros, of course, is the best possible experience.

Will Nath, Analyst, Goldman Sachs: Perfect. I guess we haven’t been through a cycle with the 0% offer at this level of scale. I think we think about marketing spend as being a lot more cyclical, but maybe discounts being a little bit more pro-cyclical. How do you think merchant engagement with things like 0% could fare if the economy is weakening?

Max Levchin, Founder and CEO, Affirm: I think it will probably go up, not down. If I had a crystal ball, I’d maybe do something else with my time. My somewhat murky crystal ball, just from conversations with merchants, tells me once they understand how these things work, they really do get behind the notion of, wait a second, I don’t have to do a 30% discount clearance sale. I can instead do a 13% and offer a three-year no interest, no fees, no asterisks. That’s pretty powerful. The economics for the merchants are meaningfully better. Once you try it, you realize it’s a rational tool and you can do this all day long.

Will Nath, Analyst, Goldman Sachs: Got it. Okay. Switching gears a little bit. You have been at the forefront of developing the credit reporting practices for BNPL with a lot of the credit bureaus. Can you talk about why you think this is important and how you think this will impact consumer credit scores and broader credit availability?

Max Levchin, Founder and CEO, Affirm: The credit score and reporting and history, which are all kind of parts of the same puzzle, that’s all a matter of public record. We’ve spoken with FICO, with TransUnion, with Experian now saying, look, this information is important. We live in an economy, a competitive one, but still one where consumers deserve to have their good repayment reflected. You know, roughly 98% of people that borrow money for us pay us back, generally speaking, without fail. There are a couple that are delinquent and sometimes default. For the 98%, our answer to why should I use this instead of my credit card, it doesn’t even help my credit score for a long time was, you’re right about that. We’ve wanted to eliminate that objection for a very long time.

I feel very strongly that the notion of reporting to the bureaus is just, you know, somewhere close to civic duty more than perhaps an important business practice. The country is built for better and worse on these credit scores and it’s important that we participate. I think the rest of the competitive ecosystem, you know, might be so bold. The ones that are refusing to report are the ones making money from late fees. That’s as simple as that. If you can make a value proposition to your consumer saying, don’t worry about being on time, it won’t go in your permanent record anyway. Wink, wink. By the way, I got some fees to harvest here. It’s an ethos, as they say, but it’s not ours. It’s a Big Lebowski reference. Sorry. Those of you who read my letters know how much I love the Big Lebowski.

The point is, I think it’s a very important thing to do. We’re glad to be doing it. I continue to call on the rest of the industry to participate. I do think it’ll shift. I think it will become more and more of a thing as consumers frankly demand it, especially as the 0% borrower that expects their good behavior to be a thing that is reflected on their credit report will absolutely not let the lender just say, you know what, sorry, it’s just not a thing we do. I’m very optimistic about it.

I think the vast majority of the people who are seeing these histories updated are quite happy because they know that when they go to get auto insurance or rent an apartment, which is not what you think about when you think about FICO score, but it is very much where that really matters, mortgages, et cetera, that’s when they get the benefit from using Affirm.

Will Nath, Analyst, Goldman Sachs: Yeah, no, that makes sense. Okay, I want to pivot a little bit. The Affirm Card has continued to scale in terms of users and customer transaction frequency. This is another column A, column B question. On one hand, you can have the Affirm Card as an offline extension to the online origination engine. You capture more in-store financing use cases in the offline world. It’s a big expansion of the TAM, and it allows you to reach non-integrated merchants. Alternatively, you can go after kind of a neobank or a primacy or a top-of-wallet relationship where you’ve got 100% of the spending spread across debit and credit and funded out of the Affirm Money Account and so on and so on. How do you think about crossing the line from BNPL lender to neobank? Do you want to do that? What are you watching internally to measure this?

Max Levchin, Founder and CEO, Affirm: We’re definitely not a neobank today. For the moment, we’re very busy being a BNPL lender. No news on that front. The card is at the very least a TAM expansion or TAM. I can’t remember which one is which, but it’s the total addressable spend that we want to capture. It just becomes a lot easier if you have a physical manifestation of the Affirm product. In that sense, we’re very excited about the growth. Obviously, we keep on finding new ways of offering it to our users in a non-intrusive way. We’re still really not that heavy-handed in our marketing of the card. The growth you’re seeing is quite natural, which is, from my point of view, extremely strong. There are many other things we intend to build beyond the fairly narrow Affirm ecosystem as it exists today. You can see it in today’s product lineup.

We do a little bit more now than just the online point of sale lending. The product that makes sense on the card, never want to front-run product announcements. I once announced the card and then it took two years to get it right. I’ll stop myself short of pre-announcing anything. One fun thing that you could readily see, we didn’t just build the card for ourselves. We built it with a view that any bank that issues debit cards might want to benefit from the power of this Visa flexible credential that we had a hand in designing and the card that can switch skins from being a pay later to a pay now kind of intuitively in just the right time. The FIS partnership that we announced a little while ago is all about that.

From all those pieces, you can readily see that banks are not really our competitors. We are here to offer a certain suite of lending-specific products because that’s what we’re very good at. That’s where we think our competitive moat is. We think the ecosystem can benefit from our underwriting and card management capacity through these partnerships that we have. More to say on that in a little while, but that’s where we’re headed through the banking lens.

Will Nath, Analyst, Goldman Sachs: Got it. All right. Sticking with the banking theme, you know, neobank or not, a lot of the major credit issuers in the country have elected to become at least a regulated bank, mostly for funding benefits. Amex, Synchrony, Ally, and then even some of the newer entrants in the space with Square and SoFi in recent years. There have been some headlines around Revolut as well, I think, in the U.S. Why not pursue this now given the change in the regulatory environment and the current administration?

Max Levchin, Founder and CEO, Affirm: I’ve been saying this for years and I’ll repeat myself. There are three reasons to become a bank or a fintech company. On the positive side of the ledger, there are three reasons to do it. On the negative side, the very real overhang of regulatory oversight. You become beholden to a whole lot more regulators in a new way. We are very, very regulated. We have 51 categories of regulated, roughly similar to the number of states in the federal regulatory regime. It’s not as though we don’t spend a ton of our time making sure we’re compliant with all the applicable laws and regulations. It would go up, but not crazy. There are different kinds of charges, I’m sure everyone knows. Under the right star alignment, you could maybe discount the cost enough. The benefits are trifold. In theory, deposits.

In practice, it takes a very, very long time to get to the regulatory comfort so that the deposit gathering, and by the way, gather deposits is a task in and of itself before you can actually benefit from the reduced cost of funding. I would say that’s like a three of three in terms of importance and relevance. The other two things that are interesting, and that’s this thing that I’ve been saying over and over again, if there’s a set of features that you can only offer with a depository license, everything we’ve done from the very beginning, regulated or otherwise, difficult or risky or whatever, it’s always been in the service of, can we build something that’s unique and defensible and special and the world needs it?

If one day there’s a feature that is just so compelling that you can only do it with a depository license, it is not a thing that’s going to escape our attention. Most importantly, and that’s sort of why in the new regime might you consider it a little bit more heavily, the regulatory certainty of having your own charter is a thing. You are regulated, but you know exactly how you’re regulated. Part of being a fintech is you’re pushing the envelope on at least interpretability of some of the things that were written without fintechs in mind. Those are the two reasons to consider it. I am primarily product-driven. I have lots of very, very good legal and compliance advisors within the company that tell me that there’s things to contend there as well. For now, nothing to say.

Will Nath, Analyst, Goldman Sachs: Got it. Understood. Okay. Bank or not, you do offer the Affirm Money Account. There are some strategic benefits like customer loyalty, as well as the financial benefits around the potential for transaction funding out of that account. Can you just provide an update on where you are on the Affirm Money Account in terms of customer adoption and how you think about strategy and attach rates longer term?

Max Levchin, Founder and CEO, Affirm: We don’t report on that for a variety of reasons, most importantly because we think of it as primarily a test lab for the fully optimized card experience. Because of our partnership with FIS, and because of our partnership with banks that we hope to speak about with this integration of the Affirm Card stack into existing debit cards, we’re not trying to say, hey, on the one hand, partner with us, bring your debit cards along, we’ll help you get exciting new features in. By the way, we’re not going to try to steal your users and grab their deposits. That is not the agenda. That said, we do have a bunch of users that said, I would love to give Affirm some percentage of my paycheck because I value the pay now functionality.

Part of the requirement is you have to have a bank account that’s connected, and we power such bank accounts with a partnership with Cross River Bank. It works pretty well. We don’t say exactly what the numbers are, but they’re compelling enough for us to continue building the feature and maintaining it. We’ll hopefully have some more interesting things to show for that product. The primary reason there would be to say, hey, this is what you can have if you choose to adopt the Affirm Card stack.

Will Nath, Analyst, Goldman Sachs: Got it. Okay. Pivoting to international expansion, how are you thinking about the opportunity in Europe today? What do you think will stay the same relative to Affirm’s U.S. business versus what do you think could be different about your international footprint in the future?

Max Levchin, Founder and CEO, Affirm: You know, we’ve said it before, we’re not going to give a perfect map of where we’re going, but the first approximation would look a lot like Europe. We’re live in the UK. Obviously, in fact, we’re just about to celebrate our one-year announcement of entering the country. We have some really exciting partnerships. Hopefully, we’re going to try to time in the near future to really light up our growth there. What stays the same is really who we are. There’ll be no fees, there’ll be no revolving debt, there’ll be no gotchas, no asterisk. The essence of Affirm, the value proposition to the end borrower and the merchant that relies on that brand halo, is always going to stay the same. A lot of things are very scalable from here to there.

We’re not building an entirely new funding model because we have plenty of partners that are saying we’d love to fund other things in other markets. Some product features are slightly different. The UK is particularly keen on Pay in 3, while in the U.S., it’s not a thing. Pay in 4 and Pay in 3 in the UK are kind of interchangeable. We’re primarily focused, by the way, on longer terms in the UK because the Pay in 3, Pay in 4 market is actually fairly well addressed. Pay in 6, 12, 18 is really not. We’re excited about that. We would like to be a participant in every transaction of every consumer worldwide. It’ll take a little while. I suspect a few more years before we get to announce total world domination. You know, we’re progressing in the right way.

Will Nath, Analyst, Goldman Sachs: Hopefully, you can do it at the Goldman Sachs conference.

Max Levchin, Founder and CEO, Affirm: You know, it’s one of the traditions.

Will Nath, Analyst, Goldman Sachs: All right. Let’s talk agented commerce. We’re imagining a world where AI agents are executing against a consumer shopping goal. Where does that journey start? How do you know if it ends up driving more volume for Affirm or ends up commoditizing payment stacks across the industry as more of a backend component of those transactions?

Max Levchin, Founder and CEO, Affirm: It’s actually, I think it’s a great question, first of all. I think that’s why it’s a little bit of a payoff moment for starting a company in the hardest part of the payment stack. My prior shenanigans involved above the rails. That typically meant that you don’t take any of the risks, but you get to have something that’s always in danger of being commoditized, where there’s another person processing cards, another person creating a wallet. To take the risk, to manage the risk, to underwrite the risk, to deal with the ups and downs of macroeconomic change is the value that is, that’s where a majority of the value exists. If you look at everyone from Visas to all the other networks, the ones that do their own lending, e.g., American Express, post much higher margins for a good reason. Risk is, in fact, the value added here.

As agented commerce becomes a thing, which, by the way, I’m generally speaking, a very, very strong bull, I think we will see more of a new channel, less of a substitute channel. If you look at sort of how the world has played out in groceries, where we’ve had agented commerce for a long time, except it’s human agents. Like I tell Instacart to just go replenish my banana supply, and it happens magically. Someone goes and buys bananas. Most of the time, they’re really good. Yesterday’s order was all green, but you know, I’ll still ask Instacart to replenish it. Grocery stores haven’t suffered. We haven’t seen a total destruction of the grocery market just because Instacart has standardized the interface to reordering. You can infer some interesting possibilities from that for a more sophisticated purchase. There will be some increase of invisibility of commerce.

You will say, yes, get it for me, and the majority of the steps taken may be even invisible to you. You’ll still care whether you’re paying interest, where it’s going to sit in your personal financial ledger. Are you getting a great deal? Maybe in the form of a discount, but maybe in the form of a reduced APR. In that world, we have a huge role to play. Generally speaking, I think this will accrete to Affirm in the strong positive and to the industry at large. We’re not going to be the only buy now, pay later playing. Although I think being a very strongly technology-focused company accretes to the early adopters of the AI commerce. Very bullish. I think you’ll see us pop up in interesting places.

The most interesting puzzle outside of lending and BNPL and Affirm will really be this tension between the fully in-app completion of transactions versus the second sale, which every merchant knows is the most important thing. How will providers of agented commerce enable merchants to come back and say, hey, you bought X, but there’s a Y and a Z to go with it? I think that’s maybe a partially solved problem in e-commerce today. We get a lot of inbounds from people telling us, hey, that TV is great, but you know, there’s speakers to go with it. I think the ability to say, yes, let’s complete that transaction too. By the way, the 0% deal you had with the TV still lasts for the speaker.

The context that we used to have to infer from a lot of merchant side management will now be kept and managed at the LLM, which I think is going to be very powerful and will accrete to our underwriting.

Will Nath, Analyst, Goldman Sachs: Right. On a related note, your DTC volume, both Affirm Card and the in-app volumes continue to grow very rapidly. What role do you see the in-app shopping journey playing in the company longer term?

Max Levchin, Founder and CEO, Affirm: Unlike some of our esteemed competitors, we don’t think of ourselves as a starting point for a shopping journey. You’re not going to Affirm to take between green pans and orange. It’s just not what people do. I think that’s a fool’s errand to compel them to do that. It’ll be more likely to happen inside of an LLM agent and maybe normally still starts with Google. The reason you go to the app today is to pay your bills first and foremost. Increasingly, you’ve seen our frequency go up to, at this point, more than doubled since the IPO alone, to set up your next transaction, to control the card, to make sure you have the purchasing power, to find the latest deal.

The most important piece of the app that is really just accelerating, firing on all pistons, if you will, is the fact that it is the definitive repository of what is being offered by the 0% sponsoring merchants, reduced APRs, et cetera, et cetera. In that sense, I think we’ll continue gaining traction up the app. That’s why we continue seeing growth, not just from the card, but also from within the app itself.

Will Nath, Analyst, Goldman Sachs: Great. Got about a minute and a half left. You’ve referenced the FIS partnership or alluded to it several times. Sticking with the theme of distribution, you’ve talked about your coverage footprint in the e-comm world. When you think about the distribution on the consumer side that the FIS partnership can give you, could you talk a little bit about how you see that partnership scaling and just any receptivity to the partnership from your conversation so far?

Max Levchin, Founder and CEO, Affirm: I’ll go back to the beginning. Everything we do, we do very seriously and it takes a while. These things take time to fully bloom, given that there is real risk and real underwriting and real capital markets, et cetera, et cetera, involved. The partnership announcement was a really important point to say, hey, this is real. We aren’t just talking about it privately. We’re now willing to say it out loud. It’ll take a little while longer, but the next step is to announce some banks that are actually adopting this technology and showing some real traction. Nothing to declare just this moment, but pretty happy with the way things are going. We’re head down building some really cool things. Maybe the next conference, we’ll have some tallies to offer.

Will Nath, Analyst, Goldman Sachs: Awesome. I’ll hold you to it. Thank you. That’s about all the time we have, but appreciate you joining us. Thank you for the continued sponsorship of the conference.

Max Levchin, Founder and CEO, Affirm: Thank you for having me.

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