So good day, everyone. Thank you again for dialing in to our quarterly fireside chat with our Chief Financial Officer, Michael Linford. We would like to thank Ramsey El-Assal from Barclays for hosting the call with us today. For those of you, excuse me, that have not used the Say Technologies platform, we encourage you to submit questions ahead of the calls, and we will do our best to address them here. We appreciate the participation and engagement from all of our investors, especially those who submitted questions in advance. Before we begin, I would like to remind everyone listening that this discussion may contain forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are subject to numerous risks and uncertainties, including those set forth in our filings with the SEC, which are available on our Investor Relations website.
Actual results may differ materially from any forward-looking statements that we make today. These forward-looking statements speak only as of today, and the company does not assume any obligation or intent to update them, except as required by law. And with that, I'll hand it over to Ramsey, who will begin the fireside chat today. Ramsey?
Thanks, Zane. And Michael, thank you so much for the opportunity to host the fireside chat. Looking forward to our conversation today. There's always a lot to talk about with Affirm, which is a good thing, and maybe we can dive right in with your recent announcement about the partnership with Apple Pay. We've definitely been getting a lot of inbound questions on the topic, so maybe we can start there. But first, just thanks again for the opportunity.
No, thank you for working with us here.
Thanks.
And thanks, everybody, for dialing in. There is a lot to talk about, and that's a really good thing, and it's, that's the one thing that's pretty constant here at Affirm, is how much we have going on. So the partnership with Apple Pay that was announced is really exciting for us. It is a furtherance of a lot of things that we've been talking about, you know, really going back 1.5 years now, about ways in which we're finding other ways to distribute our product. When we talked in November about what we called winning at checkout, that we talked about both the direct merchant integrations and all the other ways the product would be distributed, and we highlighted some of our other wallet partnerships then.
Today, we're excited to add another wallet to that list. And it's not just another wallet, it's a pretty massive and important wallet in Apple. I think investors should think about three benefits here for Affirm, and I know you have a lot of questions and specifics, some of which we can get to, some of which, you know, honestly, it's too early to talk about. But the first benefit is it really will be a seamless merchant integration. So you think about the challenge of integrating with Affirm today, that usually requires a lift on the merchant side.
And so a lot of our distribution opportunities, both things that we've done with the large platforms, as well as the wallets, have all been around enabling easier paths to adopting and enabling Affirm on the merchant site, and this is another great example of that. It's also a really cool chance for us to continue to distribute our product direct to consumers. The more we're in wallets, in addition to being integrated on merchant sites, the more consumers have a chance to see us. So you may be a user of a wallet and then see us as an option within that wallet, and in a way in which you would have never seen us before.
And obviously, the bigger the wallet and, and the more used that wallet is, the more impactful it is to us in terms of a chance to give our consumers who know us and love us another chance to see us. And alongside that is a chance to see more users that we wouldn't see otherwise. And so we think in a lot of ways, this opens up both the opportunities for consumers to use us and the number of consumers we can get to, which, you know, really is summarized maybe best as a pretty big, addressable market opening up for us here that we wouldn't get before. And, and that's consistent with all of our strategy with, with wallet distribution right now.
I see. I mean, it sounds like, obviously, a super exciting partnership. How'd you do it? What were the differentiating kind of factors that had Apple kind of selecting you guys versus others?
Yeah, I think you'll have to ask Apple that question. I don't know that I can tell you why they picked us, but I can speak to why I think our largest enterprises do prefer Affirm. And this would be another example of us having credibility, as a fintech company, having credibility with some of the largest technology and commerce platforms out there. And it comes down to a number of things. I think, first and foremost, we're a product- and engineering-led company, and product and engineering are technology-oriented companies like working with people like us. Because we can speak their language, we can move at their speed, we can understand their concerns and requirements, and we're generally pretty good about getting to those. You know, that's obviously hugely important when you're working with the world's largest retailers.
They care a lot about reliability and service levels, and they also care about how you serve the customer. Our product-led culture and the way in which we put the consumer first really matters a lot to the biggest brands out there. They wanna make sure that when products like ours are being offered, they're going to be proud of the consumer experiences they get. The consumers are gonna have good experiences with our product. We invest so much energy there, both in terms of things that we do to the product that make it work without the stuff that would be embarrassing to them.
So, for example, we don't have deferred interest, we don't charge late fees, we don't have the same tricks that exist in a lot of other BNPL products, but then also just the experience itself, how slick the checkout is, how certain the consumer is when they check out. You know, sometimes these products are tried to deliver in a way where you have to go do 30 other things to get the product to work for you. For example, a lot of the credit card offers, it's a common thing. And the fact that we're able just to offer a straight, transparent, very simple and easy-to-understand offer to the consumer is something that these large brands, you know, are willing to put their name behind. And then I think, lastly, it should be said that our breadth of product really matters here.
If we were only able to do one thing, it's easier to say, "Well, we could, we could do that or ourselves, or we could find somebody to do that one thing," the more commoditized it gets. So if we just did Pay in 4, I think it'd be harder for us to win the largest enterprise partnerships. But the idea that we can do Pay in 4, we can do now Pay in 2 or pay in really any period of time. We can spread out the loans over a long amount of months or a pretty short amount of months. We can charge interest, we can charge no interest, we can charge low fixed interest.
That huge diversity of product offerings means that we can fill more use cases and gives, I think, our largest partners a higher desire to integrate us because they know that we can actually serve more of their transaction types, and that working with us has a higher payback than if they work with a smaller player who only does one thing.
Hmm, interesting. So the breadth of products is a differentiator, basically.
Exactly.
I initially, when this partnership was announced, I got some questions about the relationship between, like, Affirm Card and the wallet integration. So maybe just to clarify, you know, do consumers need Affirm Card to use Affirm and wallets, presumably this one as well, that you're integrated with? Or how does that work?
Yeah. So when we think about wallet integrations, that's separate from the integration a consumer might be able to get with a card. So no, those are separate things. When we integrate into the wallet, that's us getting the wallet to directly initiate Affirm transactions as opposed to looking like a Visa transaction to the wallet, but then behind it becomes an Affirm transaction. And so we think about the latter, you know, just the card version as... You know, honestly, it's already integrated everywhere. I'm exaggerating a little bit. I'm sure there's cases where it's not. But you can put your Affirm Card, and I certainly do, in any number of wallets today, and it works great. But that is different than when I'm checking out with one of these wallets. Take Shop Pay Installments is a really good example.
I can still use my Affirm Card in Shop Pay's Shop Pay, and it'll look like a Visa card to Shop Pay. However, in the Shop Pay experience, I'm also able to take out a Shop Pay Installments loan, which is obviously delivered by us. And that, it's that second experience that's unique, when we think about integrating with the wallets, that's the one that becomes really valuable because it's a distribution that's wider. You don't have to have the Affirm Card. New users get to see it, which means we're attracting and talking to new consumers, and all this is done usually with very little merchant lift at all.
And another question along similar lines: Do the wallet partnerships... Is there any tension sort of between the wallet partnerships and the Affirm Card? Meaning, can any of the wallet partnerships, you know, replace Affirm Card, or how does the card kind of coexist alongside the wallet partners?
Yeah. Maybe just to generally address it, we, we think we're so early in the adoption of our category and the distribution of the product, that when we think about potential conflicts in the channel, we think that's, like, a downstream problem, and we even embrace it. We, we think about it as, it'd be awesome if Affirm was directly integrated with a merchant and there were multiple wallets offering Affirm, and the Affirm user had a card. Because what we, we find is that those incremental distribution opportunities are less likely. The, the cannibalization effect is outweighed by the value of a second or third distribution, even on one merchant site. And so we don't think about these things as being even at all in tension yet, and that's mostly just due to the relative maturity of the product in the industry.
You know, maybe 10 years down the road, when we're 15% of U.S. e-commerce, that might change. But until we get to that point, there's just so much growth opportunity, those conflicts don't really come up yet. So we think about the card, we think about it as another way to serve repeat usage for Affirm users. We don't think about it as taking away from anything, besides other direct-to-consumer distributions that we've done.
Okay. And then getting a little bit into the sort of experience and maybe the technical side a little bit, how do your wallet partnerships work with merchants that don't already have the commercial relationship with Affirm? Will consumers, you know, obviously, still be able to use Affirm at these merchants, or how does it work?
Yeah, I should make sure I'm really clear on this. Let me speak to the wallet approach generally, because the specifics are obviously still very much in play and subject to a lot of change. And I think in general, the approach changes over time, and so I'll talk to how it works and what the vision is, but just acknowledge that, you know, we're still building one of those products right now, and so I don't want folks to assume too much too literally. But the deal with the wallet, the distribution partnership with the wallet, is a chance for us to extend the surface area that Affirm is available on. And that almost always, in an ideal case, stands alongside or in addition to direct integrations with merchants.
It's usually never in conflict with. But if it's in conflict with, it's important that, from our perspective, that there's performance parity, meaning that the consumer experience, the offers available to the consumer, et cetera, are uniform. And those are the situations where we'd be more comfortable, you know, only having one path. But in general, our preference is that the consumers are able to use Affirm through the wallets and able to use Affirm directly on the sites, and again, through the cards. Obviously, when we talk to merchants, what we'd love them to do is help us put similar commercials in place for all transactions. That's the best thing for the user.
But we're conscious of the fact that the wallets have a distribution that's just substantially bigger than what we have today, and that's part of the reason why it's interesting. So if we're not able to get to the full tail, that's okay because the wallet allows the merchants to use the product without having to have a contract and all of the associated commercials negotiated directly with Af firm.
I see. From my side, it's hard not to kind of dream about the future here, so I'm going to ask you a couple questions that you may or may not be able to comment on. But the announcement specifically indicated the integration will only support online transactions for users in the U.S. So the two other vectors that I'm thinking about in terms of maybe some future expansion opportunities might be, you know, offline transactions and/or transactions outside the U.S. So I'm just curious if you have any comment on that, those ideas.
I'm reminded a little bit about the conversations we have anytime we announce a big partner, and we talk about where we start with that partner. And folks like you, and to be honest, you know, the rest of the team here, too, at Affirm say, "Okay, but what about the next thing that's bigger and exciting, and what's down the road, and how could it be bigger?" And it's really important that we don't put the cart before the horse. We don't have a product live yet. We should not be focusing on where we will go after the thing that isn't even done yet is live. And so we're focused on doing that first step.
But if you look at almost all of our partnerships that have any scale to them, they start off with one thing, and they expand over time because we deliver real value to the merchant, to the consumer, to the partner, and that's our North Star. We always say that our North Star is, is making sure the merchant wins, making sure the consumer wins. And if we do that, then, of course, these partners want us to do more with them. And, you know, I, I looked up at some of our partnerships. So our biggest partnerships are really proof points for that. You know, the growth rate for our largest partners last quarter was significantly higher than the company growth rate, which was obviously many multiples of U.S. e-commerce.
And that was because despite those partnerships being 3 and 4 years old, we're finding more and more ways to grow with them. Sometimes that's incrementally new things, like new geographies. Sometimes it's new features, it's availability or applicability on their platform. Sometimes it's just good old-fashioned improvements in conversion, but all that together just is the opportunity. And so when I think about the opportunity wallets, I don't constrain it to where we're currently at. I define that opportunity as everything that Wallet does.
The timeline that we get to address everything, that's the thing that's a lot less certain, and I think the reason for some humility here is we don't even have our product live yet, so we're going to focus on getting the first step live, making sure that we're proud of that experience, making sure consumers actually adopt it and love it, making sure it gets real traction. And then, I think it's fair to ask, where do these wallets go from there? And it's not, again, it's not just the one we started the conversation off with. I think there's a similar path going on now for all of our wallets. This is certainly not unique to just this wallet, although this one is obviously very special to us.
I see. Your 8-K mentioned that the solution would be rolled out later this year but was not going to have a material impact, P&L impact in fiscal 2025. You know, I guess give us a little more color on that. What will the rollout look like? Why won't it have a material impact on 2025?
Yeah. Couple things to think about. One, most things we do have a very controlled and, and thoughtful rollout plan because we don't like, from a risk standpoint, anything happening that we can't keep our arms around. So we're always measured in how we roll things out. We want to move quickly, of course, but we want to be very thoughtful. There's a lot more downside in messing stuff up than upside in getting it right with these things, and so it's important to us that we do it well. Secondly, you know, we're pretty big now. We're certainly nowhere near the size of some of these partners that we're onboarding, but we're really big, and so for things to be material in the near term, they have to also be really, really big, really, really quickly.
And I think we're mindful of the fact that this product is still being developed, and it's going to take a little while for that to be live, and then it's going to, we're going to be very thoughtful about the rollout. And that's what, like, leads us to say we don't expect it to be super material in the near term. That shouldn't take away from the conviction that we have around this and all the other opportunities as being very material in the long run. I think in the long run, this will matter a whole lot, just like with Affirm Card. If you remember, with Affirm Card, we told everybody that it wasn't going to be material early, and obviously, it's increasing substantially in its materiality to our business, and we would expect it to continue to be material into the future.
And I think it's very similar here, which is the wallet's going to be thoughtful and measured because we're good risk managers. None of that takes away from what we evaluate as this being a pretty strategic piece in our total distribution, and a key part of achieving the growth formula that we laid out for investors last November. We talked a lot about winning at checkout. This is a really critical part of that, and part of the reason we feel confident in compounding at the rates that are, you know, multiples of U.S. e-commerce growth, is because we have distribution opportunities like this that we're working on.
Hmm. It sounds to me, paraphrasing your prior answer, is just that, you know, investors have had an experience of you guys rolling out some pretty substantial partners already. So there is some kind of precedent in terms of the, you know, the long-term ramp and the, and the success of the execution, candidly, and the integration. So I think that's probably a good thing at the end of the day.
Yeah. And we do a pretty good job at Affirm of resisting the short-term, long-term trade-off that is a negative one. We don't try to make it bigger early just so it's big, and we feel like we've made real traction. We're really thoughtful around scaling it responsibly. And that approach has really paid off. As you remember, like, our business is really complicated, and we have so many people in our ecosystem that we need in order to function well, capital markets being a really good example. And so what we don't want to do is create assets that deviate from our desired economic profile in a manner with which we can no longer execute in the capital markets. And we won't.
Here, we feel really good about that, but that's a good example for a reason why we're always very thoughtful and measured here. It's still growing very quickly, of course, but we're thoughtful and measured about these ramps. And so we don't want or expect this thing to be material in the first weeks and months after launch... but none of that takes away from its long-term scale. I fully expect this is a key part of our growth formula for the years ahead.
And keeping in mind, you just sort of reminded us that you're a bigger company now, and so individual deals might not have the same, you know, contribution factors they might have some years ago. But do you expect this deal to have any meaningful impact on your overall unit economics? Is your long-term 3%-4% RLTC as a percentage of GMV target altered at all, still valid? What's your thoughts there?
Yep, we continue to expect 3%-4% long term. When we give that kind of guidance, we're thinking about all the factors that go into that, including what our distribution is in the near term, midterm, how we're negotiating, what our product roadmap is. So, you know, when we say that, we're definitely taking into account these kinds of distribution. I think it is the case that with any new program, it may not be at the, you know, well, scaled level of economics in its first couple of months or quarters, and that's totally normal. I mean, it's certainly what we saw when we rolled out programs like we did with Shopify. But the...
There's nothing we view structurally about how we're going to market with this distribution approach that would change our long-term margin structure in the business. And that is really, again, reflective of just how many points of control we have in our business. Our product isn't just one thing, and so because we have so many different ways to create assets that have value, we can find a way to monetize that intelligently, and that's true no matter which the distribution path that we're taking.
Okay. I'm gonna pivot over to some non-Apple questions now, since we've picked that one pretty clean, I think. What can you share with investors as an update since you last reported earnings in May? And more broadly, I think the second part to that question is: What is consumer health and the consumer spending environment look to you guys at this point?
Yeah. You know, I think trains are continuing to be on time, which is how we're talking about it. You know, our outcomes are in line with expectations. We feel like the consumer is still benefiting from really robust employment and strong wages. We talk about savings rate as being a bit of a concern out there. I don't think that any of us, we don't certainly have a macroeconomic house view or anything of the sort, just not how we run the business. But I do think the data that we look at suggests the consumer is still actively engaged in the economy and employed, such that they can fulfill their obligations.
I think, the rate environment continues to be really volatile, and I would expect that to be the case for the time being, with, I think, it netting out to what we've been talking about, which is this business is pretty well-positioned for a higher-for-longer environment. We've done all the work we need to to get our units very strong in this environment and feel like that will continue throughout the higher for a longer period. So, you know, from a rates perspective, we're certainly not looking for any material changes in terms of how we think about running the business. And so consumer's relatively healthy. Rate environment is, well, volatile. You know, the rate curve will move around quite a bit on us.
The net of it has been a trend towards, you know, sustainably higher rates. And those two things together kind of say that it's business as usual, and really nothing has changed in our business, and certainly nothing has changed with respect to consumer demand. We benefit a lot from the fact that consumers are really voting with their wallets on a new payment method, right? Consumers are choosing to put the cards down and pick up Affirm. And so a lot of the factors on the margin that you hear some of the other unsecured consumer credit players talk about, we just don't see, 'cause we're benefiting from a secular change that masks any of the stuff that's on the margin.
When our secular growth rate slows down, and we're more tethered to the high single-digit growth rates, I do think you're gonna have us express some of those things, but right now, it's just masked by the fact that we've got pretty strong adoption of the category overall.
T hat makes a ton of sense. Listen, I'm gonna take a related question from the Say platform, from someone named Justin E., and the question is as follows: "Is growing consumer debt a concern, and if so, how do you plan to address it with your products?" And then same question on consumer credit: "Feels like employment is hanging in, inflation lower on a year-over-year basis. Any changes in credit performance trends to call out?
Yeah. Good question. Thank you, Justin. The second one first is really no changes to call out. Employment's holding up, and the consumer, or the American consumer, is spending, fully employed or, you know, mostly employed, able to find work. And so feel really good about that. On the consumer debt side, a couple of things to think about. One, our product is designed to get consumers out of debt very quickly. This is a fact I think a lot of people skip over. It's part of my blog post I wrote on the various news articles on phantom debt. Our product amortizes very, very quickly. It forces consumers to pay back on a very quick and fixed schedule.
Because it isn't a revolving line, because the payment schedules are fixed, there's a huge amount of velocity to it. In the capital market sense, that's really attractive to capital markets investors because that means that the assets, the risk profile is advantageous because it moves so quickly. And for consumers, it's difficult for you to have a lot of exposure for a long time because every month you're paying back a pretty meaningful portion of the obligation. And so it's engineered in a way, when users use our product, to reduce the total obligations very, very quickly. Balances on credit cards have a funny way of sticking around at the same levels. Affirm balances go down definitionally very, very quickly.
You know, I like to talk about, one of my favorite stats is on the order of 40%-45% of the balances we originate in a quarter are fully paid back to us by the time we report earnings. And so quarter happens, you know, roughly six weeks later, we're talking to the market about earnings, 40%-45% of loans are fully paid back. And so when you think about that, that the consumers just, it just moves very, very, very quickly. Six weeks is a long time in, in our business. So 40% of the balances, I should say. So as a result, we don't think our product... We think our product is actually the solution, not, not any cause of the problem.
Now, if you ask me the macro question, right, okay, so fine, Affirm is good, but what are you concerned with what's going on away from Affirm and the consumer more broadly? I think that we like to look at any level of unsecured consumer debt against either PCE or some other inflation-adjusted measure, or against their wages. And all those indications point to towards a return to pre-COVID trends, much more so than anything that we would be particularly alarmed with today. With the caveat being, that's like one of the core things we look at when we underwrite consumers. We look at their obligations away from Affirm. One of the reasons we do so much underwriting on every transaction is because we want to understand what those consumers have in their financial life and their obligations.
And when we have to tell a consumer no, it's because we're worried that their obligations are too high away from us, and that's a thing that has been true since day one, and we would look at the macro situation and say, "Feels a lot more like pre-COVID than it does to feel like it's higher or lower." I think the first derivative for a lot of folks looks high because we're coming out of such a surplus environment, and I think that's more of a reversion to the mean than anything else with the consumer away from us.
Okay. You mentioned earlier that the secular tailwinds underpinning the business, and just that there are quite a few consumer. There's a lot of consumer demand here that, you know, new customers coming into the top of the funnel effectively. Give us your updated thoughts. It's hard for investors to get that kind of market-wide view about, you know, what inning we're in, and where does buy now, pay later stand, you know, as a percentage of spend or as a percentage of e-commerce, however you're looking at it. But give us your view about sort of where we are in the adoption cycle of buy now, pay later in the U.S.
Yeah, great question. I think I think the rate of adoption has been remarkably constant for the past five years. I think the amount of excitement or whatever the opposite of excitement is for the category has moved a lot more than the underlying data would suggest. In other words, I think investors and frankly folks like us here on the line feel like it's been a lot more volatile than the consumer would tell you if you go talk to the consumer on the street. If you go talk to them on the street, you'll see that this is part of a pretty steady and consistent trend where consumers understand their credit situations very well. There's a bit of a misconception I ran into recently which I thought was really interesting.
An investor, a well-meaning investor, said: "These, these consumers of yours, they're not very credit savvy." I think it's a horrible misconception. These consumers are some of the most credit-savvy consumers out there. I'd like to point out that if you transact on your credit card and you don't carry a balance, you don't know what your APR is, and you don't even know what your balance is. Your - it just comes out of you're out. A lot of folks who don't carry a balance assume that means that they're more sophisticated on credit. It's true that they spend less for credit, that's undeniable, but they don't understand the inner workings and how credit and credit cards work, and the trade-offs around purchase decisions.
Consumers who actually pay it, and that's part of their financial life, they're very aware, and our consumers tend to be very, very aware and credit savvy. And as a result, they understand the value of what we provide. It has got features in it that are really attractive to them, that gives them control because the payment schedule is fixed and certain. We can express the total cost of the purchase in a dollar amount upfront, whether that's $0, because it's a true 0% Affirm loan or an APR loan, they know the costs with immutable certainty upfront. So it's super valuable to them, and those trends are continuing. You know, the value of this product in someone's financial life is a trend that's been pretty consistent, and I think going to continue to grow.
I think that, that is why the industry is growing as quickly as it is, and is why we have been able to grow as quickly as it is. The interesting thing, maybe though, is just how the competition landscape has ebbed and flowed, and that does change the market, 'cause it's a small enough market still where, an entrant or an exit from the market can have a pretty big effect on the market's growth rate. I think that's been really interesting for us to watch, where you have, again, the relative excitement in the industry driving some people into the category before they realize just how hard it is, and how difficult it is to do this. And then some of them retreat, and then some double down.
I think where we are now is kind of right back to a low level of competitive intensity that is consistent with a good long-term growing category, as opposed to a potentially, you know, overly excited category, which I think we got to, maybe a few years ago. And that's why if you look at Affirm's GMV growth rate now, you know, I think we've been growing in the roughly 30% context for a minute or two, and I think that is a really high growth rate for a category and a company our size and scale. And is why I think it's now beginning to attract the attention of the more traditional FIs. So I think five years ago, they were dismissive of the category.
A lot of technology companies came in first, and I think a lot of FIs have woken up to the need to be able to address this. And so, yeah, the competitive landscape ebbs and flows, but again, I don't think in the eyes of the consumer, any of the volatility that we think is there has really been there. It's been a steady adoption of the category. And if you go back and look at the estimates we had and the market had around adoption of the category, again, it's been remarkably consistent with a slow and steady adoption and share shift towards this category, and we think that is still gonna start. And so the answer to the innings question, I don't know. I don't know...
We don't have certainty of where it will get to and when. That just isn't a knowable thing. But we know that the sheer size of consumer debt, the sheer size of consumer credit purchases in this country are so large that it's still scratching the surface, and so there's a lot of road to go. We always contextualize Affirm's opportunity and progress in terms of its percentage of U.S. e-commerce, which is now growing pretty significantly. We're really proud of how much of U.S. e-commerce that we are, and that's our primary market. We also acknowledge that offline is still a much bigger part of the economy, and there we're not even a rounding error, and there's so much opportunity there.
And so whether it's things like the Affirm Card or, or other wallet distribution opportunities over time to open that up, we feel that would say, you know, if you're judging the opportunity online and offline, that game hasn't even started yet. And if you're judging the opportunity specifically in the online case, you know, a game is clearly being played, but, but by no means are we anywhere near the asymptote of, of where we think the market begins to slow down in its adoption.
Okay. Let me take another question that was submitted previously on the Say platform. So Josiah H. asks: "How has the partnership with Amazon affected Affirm's expectations of growth?" So I guess the idea is here you have a lot of great partnerships, and, and I don't wanna leave anybody out, having... We've talked about Apple quite a bit. A lot of great partnerships, including Amazon. Do you feel these improved your growth potential over time? I guess that's sort of the question.
Yeah, I think our business model is a lot of things, but it has remained pretty consistent on the idea that we work with merchants and platforms, and now even wallets, so, you know, call them a platform if you'd like. We work with them in order to serve their consumers. We also serve consumers directly in our app, and the two work together. They aren't separate from one another, and you can't do one without the other. So our ability to build a network where consumers really understand and shop across our merchant base, alongside our ability to serve those merchants or those consumers directly away from merchants we have integrated relationships with, they help each other.
And to make it, like, super explicit, when we go talk to a new merchant, we show them how much business we're doing with them already in our direct-to-consumer environment. And sometimes it's material. Like, sometimes we're doing points of their share of business directly to our consumers without an integrated relationship. And when that happens, those merchants are forced to come to terms with the fact that the product means something to their consumer, and that's an incredible way to add adoption of our product to the merchant site.
It's a large part of the reason why now there's near uniform distribution of the major credit card providers, because no merchant wants to say no to one of the credit card brands. They understand there's a meaningful number across all of them. I think merchants are increasingly understanding that, and the more work we do direct-to-consumer validates that, alongside the largest partners. I think the largest partners really do want us to provide a service to them and to their consumers that they either can't provide or they think that we're better than others providing.
We definitely partner with the largest, and we're proud about that, and yet there's a lot left. A thing that I think a lot of folks push us on is: "Okay, you've locked up..." You know, "So there's only one Amazon in the world, right? You've already got them, so what's next?" You know, and the first point is, there's a lot of Amazon left to do. There's a very large merchant for us to do. But the second is, there's still a large amount of both online and offline commerce that we're not touching today, and those distribution opportunities really do help us.
And so the work that is in front of us is to continue to win new distribution, and we're gonna keep doing that online and offline, and we're gonna keep helping everybody out. And in turn, that will allow us to, you know, delight more consumers on these merchant sites, which gives us a chance to re-engage them directly in our app afterwards or find them again throughout the ecosystem and continue to scale the network. And so, yeah, Josiah, really important - Justin, sorry. Josiah, sorry.
You're right. Yeah, you're right.
Josiah, sorry about that. But that is. It's a really critical part of our success and will continue to be. And why when we talk about winning, we talk about making sure the merchant's winning, too. It's important to us that the merchant's outcomes are really good, 'cause that's a key, key part of our total strategy.
I wanna ask about customer engagement in a second, but there's a question regarding your capital strategy that I've been wanting to ask you, so I might as well do it here. The question is sort of about balancing growth and capital efficiency on the one hand, and on the other hand, I'm curious, you know, you guys have done such a good job with this diversified funding model. It's scaled very nicely with your business. As you scale, does your capital strategy, your funding mix change, or is this something where you think that the capital strategy and structure you have now just can kind of scale in perpetuity, effectively? Or not in perpetuity, but along with the growth of your business. Fast-forwarding a few years, you know what I mean?
Yeah. Yeah, I think, a couple of things. We feel really good about the track record we've had so far in the capital markets. You've seen us be very active in the ABS market, with both revolving deals and term deals, and they've been really well-received. Our team has executed at the highest levels, internally with the assets we're creating and the control credit that we have, and that's showing up with the capital markets giving us a lot of excitement and support. And so we feel that will continue, and feel like those markets remain open to us. There are things we need to do to continue to enable next levels of scale, which we're doing, but we feel like the environment is just extremely conducive to us right now.
There's a real lesson that we've learned that is and should be obvious to everybody, but it's really worth repeating, which is that disciplined approach I talked about in scaling new things. That disciplined approach, that is what gives you the ability to have capital not be a constraint in your business. Capital hasn't been a constraint for Affirm. It has scaled really nicely because we have been so disciplined. And that is a truism that we knew well before any of the past three years of volatility, but it's certainly written in stone now, and we're gonna continue to be very disciplined while still scaling network, which we think you can do both. We think it's a false idea that you can't do both.
So we think the ABS market is obviously very big and has a lot of room to scale, and we're gonna keep executing there. On the forward flow side, we feel like there are incrementally more opportunities. We've been talking a lot about whether it's the large insurance players directly or the impact of private credit having in the total market. Those are creating pockets of opportunity for us that we think are outsized chances to continue to scale that program in a way that's, you know, frankly, while it's more bilateral and therefore sometimes can take longer and maybe less efficient in the market sense of you can't just go to market and do a deal, and you've got to work with a partner to scale it. But can yield really stable, sticky, really large capital.
The team's hard at work there, and we feel good about scaling that channel in the near term as well. About the only channel you're not gonna see us talk a lot about is the bank warehouse funding side. Those are really important funding channels for us to manage liquidity in between and throughout the quarters, and even as a safety valve or a shock absorber to volatility in our loan book. But we certainly don't think that's the channel that represents the majority of Affirm funding at scale. Affirm funding at scale is mostly going to be in consolidated and deconsolidated ABS deals and our forward flow partnerships, and any permutations and iterations that those things take, which we're working on to enable the next points of scale.
For what it's worth, our capital team is hard at work, really scaling the capital platform to that $50 billion GMV scale we talked about in November. I don't know that I can speak much beyond that. I think that's, that's definitely long term, but, you know, that it really means the next, you know, several years' worth of, of work and focus of the business is, is what we're enabling scale for, and, and feel really confident around our ability to access that capital. You know, conditioned on us continuing to do the discipline that I mentioned before.
Mm-hmm. Great. Thank you for that. And, you know, changing channels a little bit, back to kind of customer engagement. Last quarter, I noticed that you guys saw the largest ever percentage of your transactions coming from repeat users. I guess, give us your updated view on the algorithm, you know, growth algorithm in terms of the contribution from new versus existing users.
Yeah, we've not given any framework, and I can't now around, you know, the math. But philosophically, the areas of highest risk for us are always new users. We're really good underwriters. We are really good risk managers from my perspective, but we know less about a consumer if we've never transacted with them. And once we've transacted with them, we know quite a bit about them, and certainly once we've transacted with them several times, they become a very different level of risk. And so I think a large part of the past year and a half or so of heavy focus on repeat users is a reflection of a more conservative approach to credit that we've been taking. And that is maybe the slower part of that.
The other thing that's really good is, of course, we want more frequency. And users engaging on our platform more are stickier and more valuable to us. And so it's not that repeats aren't a great thing. We're very happy with that. We want to continue to drive repeats. We just also want to be able to add more new users to the platform, and there's a lot of ways that we think we can do that, even within the credit environment that we're in. And I think it's going to become and will remain a pretty important focus area for the company. And we talked about distribution opportunities.
Now, that's one of the, one of the most important things for us, is the more well-distributed our product is, the more chances we have to encounter those consumers. And equally so is re-engaging them. One of the things we've talked about a lot is just the fact that we've actually seen, you know, 40 million-50 million users, even though only 18 million are active in the past 12 months. And it will show up as a repeat transaction, even if the user has been stale for two years. And so we think about that re-engagement as being really valuable and super important for us to do, and as big of an opportunity maybe as the next 20 million who have never tried Affirm.
But clearly, growing active users in the platform is a priority for us and something that's pretty important.
I see. The Affirm Card is resonating with consumers. We had our conference a couple weeks ago, and that installment credit card category and the Affirm Card in particular came up quite a bit. It seems like it's a thing. So, give us an update there. You know, where do things stand on the product in terms, anything you can share on adoption or, you know, how you guys are thinking about it at this point?
Yeah. It's definitely a thing. It wasn't a thing a few years ago. It's a thing now, and we expect it to be a thing that isn't just us doing it. You know, if you think about the announcement with Visa Flex, and you think about the core thing that we're trying to solve for consumers, I think we definitely hit a nerve here. And so we're proud of that, but we're not resting on it. We know that, like with anything we do, when we show the world something interesting and novel, it gets copied very quickly. And so we're fully expecting that to be the case, which means that we've got to stay ahead of the curve. For the product itself right now, it's very...
Again, this is such a boring answer, but it's true, that we're just kind of on time here. We're continuing to scale the card thoughtfully. The rate of new card is growing. The cohort size, spend levels are in line with where we want them to be, and the credit and, you know, unit economic performance is very good today, and that's before we even layer in some of the benefits that we may get if and when Visa Flex is actually live. And so we feel like this is a great business. It's still scaling alongside our other direct-to-consumer product, the Affirm Virtual Card. I think at some point, we may choose to focus everybody into one channel, but for now, we're continuing to scale and feel like the adoption is super strong there.
There's a mountain of work yet to do. As proud as we are of all of that, we, we know that there's user experience pain points that have to get addressed. Unexpected declines, those have to be addressed. Consumers need to have an understanding of how the card works, 'cause it is new, it's different. And while we're the only one with this idea out there, it's gonna take a minute for users to, to really understand the difference between a credit card, a debit card, and this card. And working towards that consumer cognition, understanding of how it works, is, is really, really important for us to hit the next level of scale. And, and that's what the team is focused on. But we're doing that while it's scaling pretty quickly. So it's not like we're- we've paused anything.
We're literally, I think, improving the airplane as it's flying. And again, we're doing all that while we're still scaling that core merchant business. And that's, you know, maybe the thing I'm most proud of what's going on at Affirm right now is, you know, the next quantum of growth and value, I think, is being built while we're still very much scaling the core thing in a way that's really attractive. And so, you know, whether it's a distribution opportunity with a new merchant platform or wallet, that business is gonna continue to scale, and the end of all that work should just be more fuel for the card continuing to scale behind it.
Let me pull another question from the Say platform from Justin P., a related question, which is as follows: "What is Affirm's product roadmap for the Affirm Card? Is it a rewards cashback program on the table? When might that roll out?
Yeah, we know we need to do more than we've done. We've done a lot of experimentation with various rewards constructs, and it's too early for us to declare we know exactly what it's gonna look like. So we know we need to do something, and we know the things that we have done today maybe aren't the right things yet. One thing that we do know will be part of the mix, regardless of where we end up, is this idea of Affirm's product offerings improving over time. For any Affirm Card users out there, you'll know that we will open up special product offers depending upon your level of usage in the platform.
So in some experiment groups, if you're a part of them, you might see, if you hit your third Pay Now transaction, you might get a special Pay Over Time offer to you that it looks like paying six installments, and they're all 0%, as an example. Those are just examples and just experiments, but those are really good ideas of rewarding loyalty without being transactional with a dollar amount or a point scheme. We think that's part of the game, no matter what.
Whether or not there's also something on top of that, I think is what we're still iterating on, but for sure, making sure that users who use us have a rewarding experience over time, and that we reinvest some of the value they create for us back in better offers for them, is something that's really important to us. And that's, you know, true real loyalty. And in a lot of ways, it's, I think, a lot about how Affirm thinks about things, like we're just... Like, anything that feels too gimmicky or gamesy is hard for us to get a lot of energy about.
Things that are more direct to the consumer, here's how, here's how your product is getting more valuable in exchange for being loyal to us and using us more often, is something we have a lot of energy for. But the caveat being, we definitely know we have to do more, and so the team, the team is continuing to work on that.
Okay. We only have about 5 minutes left here, but I wanted to ask about the U.K. rollout. That's something you guys have discussed. Give us your thoughts about, you know, update us on, is the project on track? And then also, maybe if you could comment on what is the product suite look like over there initially, and is part of the distribution opportunities, you know, following U.S. distribution partners over there, or is it something where you need to build out your own kind of distribution strategy over there?
Yeah, we're very excited. You know, thinking about things that won't be material early, but will be material over time, I think U.K. is a great example. New market entry for us is a thing that starts small and thoughtful and builds over time, and entering the U.K. is certainly how we're thinking about it. To answer your second question first, in terms of distribution, it's the answer is both. We think it's difficult to get to a market without some friendly faces, some track records and pieces of scale that help you get going.
But we made the decision, oh, almost two years ago now, to make sure that we invested in the sales and go-to-market teams locally, and they've been hard at work talking to merchants on the ground there about ways in which we can help them out. And I wouldn't expect anything super big, super early. It's going to take some time. But I think that the idea of it being one or the other is not the approach we're taking. We're taking the approach of we're gonna partner with our U.S. partners where they want to partner with us there, and we're gonna make sure we try to be as relevant to the local U.K. merchant base as possible. Qualitatively, the conversations have been awesome.
I think the merchants there are really excited to have an alternative in the market they haven't had before. They know what we do is different, and I think it's gonna be really exciting once we're there and that proves out. Again, we don't have a product that's live yet, so there's a lot of important cart and horse to be sequenced there. But we need to build a product, but we're building it, and we do expect to have transactions flowing through the pipes this year, which is pretty cool. I think that will probably mean more of a next year conversation around how it's scaling and ramping. Right now, it's about getting it in place with both existing partners, and we're hoping to have some really great U.K. merchants alongside that.
So I don't expect it to be super big early, because these things do need a lot of patience. They will not be flip the switch and it grows very quickly. It's a thing that you make sure you're very thoughtful on. It's brand new approach to credit, and underwriting, and servicing, and all of the things you have to build in a local market. And yet, the conversations we've had qualitatively with partners there, it's been really well received. I think folks are really excited to have Affirm in the market.
Fantastic. We just have a couple minutes left, so I'm gonna ask you an impossibly large question. No, I'm just kidding. I wanted to get your very brief response, and I think this might be something you guys have touched on, but there was that headline and/or Bloomberg article about buy now, pay later as a category representing systemic economic risk and a pool of so-called, you know, phantom debt. I have my own views about that, but I just thought I'd get your on the record response to that idea.
My blog post, my blog post title is the answer, and I could drop the mic. It's just phantom math.
Just don't drop any F-bombs.
I shouldn't, you're right. It's just, it's just, it's just bad math, honestly. It confuses stocks and flows. It confuses the stock of consumer credit debt with the flow of BNPL loans. The turnover of BNPL loans is so fast that they disappear before they could ever even show up in a stock. And in particular, he, the economist who wrote the article, picked a change in stock of consumer credit card balances and compared it to the flow of BNPL in a given year, which is like my head explodes in how the different logical fallacies and mathematical errors that were being made. We'd estimate that the actual impact of BNPL to be a very, very, very, very small percentage of the current consumer credit card balances.
And again, from where we started the conversation, that's inherent to how the product works. Our product amortizes quickly. We work very quickly to get consumers to pay back, and that's a very different model than credit cards. Credit cards would like it if your balance never went down. They like the fact that your balance is out there and revolving at that level for a long time. Affirm loans that don't go down are credit risk. For every Affirm loan goes down, by definition, and I think that's the approach that we take, in terms of the loans, and I think that's even common across all of the BNPL landscape.
That's something that, you know, while I think we're better at than most, I do think that the product category as a whole is better for consumers when it forces that repayment that's very, very quick, and there's no ability to say, "I'm gonna make a minimum payment," and then let the interest compound. You can't do that with these products. And so it is a mistake to think of it that way. I think we're not surprised that people who make their business pushing revolving credit are upset with us and upset with the category. We don't think that's gonna go away. And yet, we spoke up only because the math that was being done was so bad.
So if you haven't yet, go read the blog post that my team helped put together, and it really outlines the phantom math of the so-called phantom debt.
Fantastic. Listen, we're out of time. Great conversation. Appreciate it. Maybe I'll turn it over to Zane for a final comment.
Yeah. Well, thank you again, Ramsey, for hosting today's call. We certainly appreciate your time and all your insightful questions. A replay of today's fireside chat will be available shortly on our Investor Relations website. And with that, we look forward to speaking with you all again in August when we report earnings. Thank you again.
Thanks, everybody.