Okay, I think we'll get started. Good morning and welcome, and good afternoon to some out there. Happy to host a webinar here today with Affirm CFO Rob O'Hare. My name's Bryan Keane. I cover the payments processors and IT service companies at Deutsche Bank. And this is kind of a retail form of questions that we've put together, and we have a few institutional investor questions as well that we're going to mix in. I think we're going to go 60 minutes here, kind of a rapid-fire process through the question list. So with that, Rob, I just want to say, hey, thanks, thanks for doing this. And I know you're new now. You got promoted, what we thought was a well-deserved promotion to CFO.
Maybe you can just first talk about what your role has been previously before taking over as CFO at Affirm, and then we can get into some of the questions. But thanks for doing it.
Yeah, no, and thank you, Bryan, for moderating this Q&A. It's a really important forum for us, and it does give us an opportunity to speak to retail investors. So, yeah, in terms of my background, I've been with Affirm for just over four years, and I was a senior vice president, leading a couple sub-teams within finance. So, helping drive the efforts to forecast the business. I've led merchant pricing for Affirm, which sets all of our go-to-market rate cards with merchants. I've led a procurement team that helps us manage our third-party vendor spend. I've led investor relations, which obviously is the team that interacts with debt and equity investors. And then have also led our corporate development efforts, which includes M&A execution, as well as integrating those targets after they've been acquired by Affirm.
It's been really an awesome four years. I was added to our executive team just over two years ago. I've been part of that forum, and it's gotten me that much closer to some of the decision-making at the company. I've really enjoyed my time here, and I'm beyond excited to take this next step. In my new role, I'll also be helping to lead our accounting function, as well as the tax function. Those are the two biggest changes for me personally.
Got it. Got it. Great. So, I was hoping to actually kick it off with the news this morning that hit about Sixth Street becoming part of the forward flow agreements and deals for Affirm. I guess, how does this help accelerate growth in, and maybe what are the, how does this work, and what are the implications for RLTC with Sixth Street now being in the mix?
Yeah, and maybe just to recap slightly for folks that maybe didn't see the announcement this morning, we announced a large partnership. It's a three-year partnership, up to $4 billion in funding capacity with an asset manager called Sixth Street, which is a large, very large diversified asset manager. I think they manage something like $80 billion of assets under management. So, a really blue-chip partner for us. The program is set up actually where there's a joint venture between us and Sixth Street, and then Sixth Street is giving access to their clients to participate in forward flow. So I think for us, as we look ahead, you know, the $4 billion in capacity is the largest forward flow program we have. So that's good news.
You know, again, taking a half step back, the job of the capital team at Affirm is to fund all of the growth in the business, and capital never has been, never will be a constraint to us growing. So I think this is an example of us being proactive, and building relationships more deeply into the asset management community. It just helps us build excess capacity in advance of growth and to do it on what we think are really favorable terms and to build a program that we're really excited about that has a lot of potential to grow and be very long in duration.
Yeah, because I was thinking about that, this is kind of a private credit kind of investors, and usually they have higher, they expect higher returns expectations versus other forward flow partners. So does it change any mix for RLTC, the revenue less transaction cost for you guys?
It may, you know, down the road, just given its size, it may mean that we choose to move a higher proportion, maybe a slightly higher proportion of our loans off balance sheet. You know, forward flow has been a part of our funding program for a long time and a significant part of it. So I wouldn't expect any sort of sudden swings in RLTC margins because of this. I think really we're diversifying and augmenting the existing forward flow program with this, you know, with this relationship. And then in terms of the, you know, the cost of this or the returns to the partner, you know, I think those are in line with the rest of our forward flow program. Obviously, we also fund the business through asset-backed securities, the ABS market.
And there's typically a relationship between the pricing that we're able to garner on the ABS side of the world and then the yields that the forward flow partners are solving for. So, you know, I think this is nothing but good stuff for Affirm. And again, it helps us add capacity ahead of all the growth that we see in the business.
Got it. No, that's really helpful. So this is a retail forum, so I'm going to call out some retail questions and some of our questions with the institutional investor base combined. But let's start with a retail one and a popular one even on the institutional side from Bobby B., and he's asking if you could give us, you know, an update on trends you're seeing as we're now in the full swing of the holiday season with regards to BNPL demand, which is now about 8% of e-commerce volume. How does growth compare to last holiday season?
Yeah, you know, we haven't come out and given our year-over-year growth for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, you know, some e-commerce players, some commerce players generally have done that. We've chosen not to. We did call out particular strength in travel and consumer electronics. Each of those verticals for us was growing in the 40%-50% range. I think in the case of consumer electronics, it's really nice to see the growth there. You know, that was a category that saw some demand come in during COVID, and it's great to see the strength in that category. I think it says a lot about how the consumer is feeling about their discretionary spend. So, that's the two highlights that we called out.
I think it's important to remember we're growing much, much faster than e-commerce at large or much faster than the U.S. economy too. You know, we've got guidance for the December quarter out that suggests that we'll be in the high 20% range for GMV growth. So we've been very growthful, and I think, you know, when you look at some of the industry estimates for e-commerce, I've seen ranges from 8%-15% for the Black Friday, Cyber Monday period. So, again, I think it's been a really strong holiday season for e-commerce in particular. That was one of the trends that I saw in the reporting was just that e-commerce has accelerated a bit versus offline commerce. Obviously, that's a good thing for us. The lion's share of our volume comes from e-commerce.
So we're feeling good about the quarter, but not able to share specifics today.
You know, I know Adobe came out and talked about maybe 11% growth rate in some of the holiday sales. I know Afterpay had some comments, maybe they were up 10%. But you guys have traditionally always grown faster. And as you said, the guidance is for 29%. Is that mostly just share gains and just ramp of new clients that gets you guys to grow in excess of even what the BNPL market might be growing at?
Yeah, I think we're really fortunate today to have multiple growth factors. So I think it's all of the things that you outlined. We're definitely growing with our merchants and in most cases growing faster than those merchants. So we call that metric share of cart. You know, our proportion of the merchant sales is increasing. But we're also seeing really nice increases in frequency on the consumer side. I mean, we shared that we had done 5.1 transactions per user per year as of the September quarter. That frequency is up very, very nicely. So I think it's a mix of growing with the merchants, adding new merchants, of course, that's always part of our playbook, and then also deepening the relationship on the consumer side.
Got it. Got it. There's some seasonality in this December quarter. Can you just talk a little bit about the seasonality with interest-bearing loans, maybe having a higher percentage than typical, you know, quarters for you guys?
Yeah, I would say the seasonality in our business can be a bit tricky. Again, partly for the reasons I've already touched on. We're so growthful, and we have some large programs that continue to scale really nicely, and so if and when Affirm's growth ever normalizes and starts to fall, we may find a more typical seasonal pattern, but we're so growthful that it's really hard to point to a quarter and say it should be exactly this proportion of the year. You know, I would say in the last quarter, in the September quarter that we published, I think we were 75% interest-bearing loans. If you look at the December quarter in the prior year, I think we were 73% loans.
So I think between those two data points, I think we would expect the mix to be roughly in line with those two. There may be fluctuations in either direction, but some of our largest and highest growth programs are very interest-bearing heavy. And so I think as those continue to scale, we may see a modest indexing into some more interest-bearing. But for the most part, we think we've found a mix that's you know in the historical periods it's probably pretty indicative of where we're going to be for the next couple of quarters.
Does the rapid growth in Affirm Card change the mix on that?
Yeah, you know, we love Affirm Card. Affirm Card represented, I think, 7% of our users, roughly were using Affirm Card. It was about 8% of our GMV in the September quarter. So it's a really important way for us to deepen the relationship with consumer. But even that product was running, roughly 80% interest-bearing when you look at the mix of the volume that was coming from Affirm Card. So again, there may be a modest uptick in mix because of Affirm Card, but we really don't think there's going to be a meaningful change in overall mix.
Yeah. Got it. And then just staying on Affirm Card, we've obviously been impressed by that rollout since the inception there. But going back a few quarters, I think you guys have previously mentioned some hurdles on the user interface and consumer education that had impacted early adoption. Can you provide maybe some color on what were some of those learnings that helped you guys maybe fix and pick up adoption on the card?
Yeah, I mean, really, you know, if you think about what Affirm Card means for us, it's a, it's a product that deepens the relationship with existing consumers. It's not an on-ramp into Affirm. Most of our users on the Affirm Card side start with a, what we call point-of-sale loan, and then discover some of our direct-to-consumer offerings, whether it's our marketplace or Affirm Card. They're using it for their second, third, fourth transaction. We want to make sure, I mean, these, these are our best users, right? These are users that, have shown that they're good payers for us. Then also it's users that, that want to repeat and drive frequency. So, you know, really we've, we've got a, a small sort of SWAT team within the Affirm Card program that's focused on, an acronym we call surprise user experience.
And so it spells sucks, right? We want to make sure that when you go to use your card, it does what you want it to do, right? We're focused on end-to-end conversion. We're focused on reducing declinations, and then we're also focused on educating the consumer because the Affirm Card is a bit unique. It's a bit innovative relative to how other debit cards or even credit cards work, so we've spent a lot of time and thought around making sure that the consumer has confidence that when they go to make a purchase, whether it's a cup of coffee or a big screen TV, that the card is going to work for them and it can support a whole range of transactions for them from everyday spend to more considered purchases.
So really it's about reducing friction in the card, improving education for consumers in the card, and then also giving them that confidence that they know how much purchasing power they have with Affirm and making sure that that's prominent and obvious to them.
Yeah, I think there's 1.4 million Affirm Card users last I looked, and I think you guys are now at 19.5 million active consumers on the platform. So I guess how do we think about penetrating that 19.5 million of, you know, will Affirm Card be able to go to that entire base and how long will the ramp up take, to get further penetration?
Yeah, we've been really happy with the trajectory that we're on in terms of new user growth. And really it's not even new users, it's existing users navigating and migrating to card. So we've been really pleased with the trajectory there. When we think about the opportunity for card, we don't just limit the opportunity set to the, call it roughly 20 million active consumers that we had as of September 30th. We think about it as anyone that's ever taken out an Affirm loan and shown themselves to be a good payer. And so that number is, you know, north of 30 million, close to 40 million, historically. And so we think that this really does provide utility to that subset of American consumers. And I wouldn't want to limit the opportunity by putting a penetration rate on it.
I think, I've heard estimates from institutional investors that are 10%, 20%. I mean, we think that long term there's an opportunity and we've set the milestone internally to get to 20 million active cardholders, right? We've got a long way to go to get to that. And more importantly, we want a card to be a meaningful part of their spend, whether it's everyday spend or more discretionary spend. So we've set a target of getting to $7,500 per user per year for the frequency too, right? We don't just want to have a lot of cards out there and not have people utilize them. We think card's important because it unlocks a lot of surfaces that as great as our point-of-sale offering is, you know, we're not able to service certain transactions. And so the best example is everyday spend, right?
You can use the Affirm Card for transactions that typically most consumers put on a debit card. And then even maybe more importantly, I think Affirm Card is a really elegant way to get all of the functionality and all of the access to credit that Affirm offers and to get that in a brick-and-mortar setting, right? That's a big untapped area for Affirm. And also, I would say for the buy now, pay later industry at large, no one has really cracked the code on offline spend. And we're seeing really nice uptick of Affirm Card in the offline world. And so I think in our last quarter, we were north of 40% in terms of the mix of GMV that was coming from offline spend. So we think that's really encouraging as well.
Yeah, just wanted to understand the economics of the Affirm Card. I know you guys have said it's kind of in the same 3%-4% RLTC range, but just as we think about it for impacting the margins of the business, the dynamics between, you know, the in-person point-of-sale debit transaction versus an interest-bearing, you know, paying for, you know, how does that, how do the economics maybe change and how does it look compared to the core business?
Yeah, great question. I mean, I think really the long-term economics for Affirm Card in a lot of ways are going to be a function of the mix of lending products and also the mix of everyday spends that we're seeing on the card. And so today, as I mentioned, 80% of the volume on Affirm Card is showing up as interest-bearing loans. And when you look at all of our lending products, interest-bearing loans is the most profitable loan product that we have in the portfolio. So that goes a long way to driving really positive economics within Affirm Card. The other, I think, important factor to keep in mind when you're thinking about the economics of Affirm Card is that these are users that are repeat users by nature.
Typically for us, the riskiest transaction that will extend to a consumer is that first transaction. Once a user pays us back in that first transaction, the risk does start to diminish. It never goes away completely, but there's less risk inherently in the Affirm Card transactions because there are users that we've worked with and that we know. So I think both the combination of having our highest revenue take rate and RLTC take rate product be the lion's share of the volume and then also the fact that this is a user population that maybe has a bit less risk to it generally. I think those two things have contributed to really strong economics.
Got it. And then just to finish, Daniel V., a retail investor, wanted to ask about, you know, with the Affirm Card, what callouts do you have on usage trends or new growth vectors that a card can bring in? Would that include like a cashback or other incentive?
Yeah, I mean, we think that consumers that are opting into Affirm Card really are looking for the extension of credit that Affirm provides, and they want to be able to use that credit outside of our integrated merchants, and they want to be able to use it. We're seeing increasingly in store. So we think that's right now the killer feature. The killer feature of Affirm Card is that it's Affirm on a card. So we've experimented with, because this is a very, you know, high frequency sort of power user base for us, we've experimented with introducing some new products to the Affirm Card base first, right? So we've experimented with things like Pay in 6, for example.
And then I think we can also do some unique things around maybe reducing the APR for certain transactions, promotionally using 0% offerings within the Affirm Card base. We think those are the surfaces that we should be experimenting with to drive increased frequency more so than a cashback program or a traditional rewards program.
Got it. Got it. So I wanted to turn to some of the partnerships and merchant wins. Sean T, a retail investor, wanted to ask about some of the ways Affirm plans to expand its distribution across different websites.
Yeah, I mean, I think we're actually pretty proud of our distribution today. We think we cover more than 60% of U.S. e-commerce through integrated relationships, right? We work with some of the largest providers in e-commerce. But that all said, we also don't think we're done or that there's not a massive opportunity ahead of us. And so when we think about distribution, given the size of our base and the nature of the merchants we're already working with, we also, you know, start with how can we do more with our existing partners and how can we bring the entire product set to some of these large programs that we have. You know, I think Shopify is a great example of landing a program and expanding it over time.
We started the Shopify program to be a Pay in 4-only program, and about a year later, the program was expanded to include interest-bearing loans, and we've since added longer-term 0% loans as well. So that program now includes all three of our core loan offerings, which we think is really important to long-term growth and also to making sure we have the right appetite and have the right set of offers that can resonate with consumers with different preferences around borrowing. So I think that's the playbook in a nutshell. But we're also partnering with, you know, a couple different types of partners, right?
So we've got some really exciting wallet partnerships on the consumer side that sort of moves Affirm from being what we would consider a closed loop when we're integrated with the merchant to being more of an, an open loop, right? We can ride the credit card rails to facilitate those transactions on, on a wallet, even when we don't have an integrated, relationship with the merchant. As long as the merchant accepts Visa, we can, we can facilitate the transaction and make it profitable for us and, and share some of that profit with the wallet partner. Similarly, we've done a lot of work to integrate with some of the largest merchant acquirers in the world. So Stripe is a, is a great partner of ours. We're integrated into Stripe.
And so, if a merchant, large or small, decides to use Stripe to process payments, Affirm is available as an alternative payment provider, within their platform. So we've seen really nice traction there, and that allows us to sort of scale with these platforms and not necessarily go door to door, adding small merchants in particular.
Yeah, one of those partnerships obviously is a small company called Amazon, and they represent a large percentage of GMV over the last few quarters. I think it's something up to 23% of your GMV. You just provide color on that relationship, how it should trend going forward, especially with them maybe adding a few other BNPL providers.
Yeah, you know, we did share in the most recent quarter, I think the 23% stat. I don't know, you know, Amazon's total size for U.S. e-commerce, but I would wager that they're a larger proportion of U.S. e-commerce on their side than they are for us, right? You know, I think they're much larger than 23% in the U.S. and for e-commerce at large. So that tells us that we're still underpenetrated with Amazon, as big as that program has scaled to be for us. We still think there's a ton of opportunity to continue to grow and to continue to compound for the foreseeable future. So we're really excited about it. They're a very sophisticated partner for us, and they push us to do our best.
We think that there's some really unique things that we can do within the Amazon ecosystem, and we're really excited for the roadmap that we have to continue to drive conversion for Amazon and growth for both us and Amazon.
Do you think that any of the new competition that Amazon might add or adding is going to change your guys' growth rates much or?
I mean, I think it's up to us to make sure that we execute and that we're great partners for Amazon. I mean, I would argue that Amazon has always been a competitive environment for us, right? There's 0% offers from credit cards on Amazon. There's other forms of financing that have always been available on Amazon, and so it's on us to make sure that we're putting fair and honest offers in front of Amazon's consumers, that we're delighting those consumers and that, again, we're driving conversion for Amazon itself. I think we don't expect to benefit from some form of exclusivity or to get special treatment by Amazon. I think it's on us to win the checkout box and to earn our prominence on that site.
You mentioned, you know, Shop Pay and I think now they're $10 billion in cumulative volume. So could you maybe help us understand some of the add-ons to the program, like Shop Pay Commerce component, which is separate from Shop Pay and just, you know, what that might do to push forward the growth rate for the Shop agreement?
Yeah, and maybe just to level set for everyone. So Affirm is the exclusive provider of installment lending within the Shop Pay sort of wallet that is part of Shopify. So we call that program Shop Pay Installments. That's a program that we co-developed with Shopify and have been innovating against for several years now. So there's, I think the fact that it is something that both companies look at as co-owned. I think that goes a long way when we're thinking about expanding the surfaces that we touch. You know, I think Shop Pay is an important revenue driver for Shopify and we're really happy to support it. And we've seen really awesome growth and penetration of the program. And so we're ready to go to support what we call Shop Pay off-shop, which is their expansion outside of the ecosystem.
And again, I think it's a great, you think about the Venn diagram of what we do and what Shopify does. Shop Pay is just a logical extension of, for both companies, right? Where we pride ourselves on our ability to integrate with merchants large and small with a whole host of requirements. And this is the same problem set that we've been solving and that Shopify's been solving for a long time.
Can you talk a little bit about some of the non-traditional retail verticals Affirm is available to consumer or that consumers might not be available? I think Najar S. is a retail investor. He's asking in particular about offering, you know, pay later for elective medical procedures and other expenses not covered by health insurance.
Yeah, no, I think, you know, you look at sort of what elective medical can mean, whether it's an optometrist, whether it's a med spa, whether it's a dentist, right? It's a considered purchase, right? Or in some cases, it's almost, you know, an emergency purchase that maybe wasn't planned. And the average order values in those categories can be quite high, you know, into the thousands of dollars. And so, there's a lot about those dynamics that resonates with what Affirm does. We serve that sector today. We think it's an important category for us. We have some direct relationships with merchants that are providing those services, but we also work with some of the platforms that serve those clinics and storefronts.
So we have a partnership with RepeatMD, which is a sort of a practice management software and payments provider for the med spa space and for elective medical clinics. We work with another platform called Zenoti. So yeah, there's a lot to like about that category. And we've been leaning in there for a while now.
Great, great. Wanted to turn to credit and profitability. A common question we get, and I'm sure retail investors have, is just talking about Affirm's differentiated underwriting capabilities, which has been really strong. You know, DQ rates and credit losses have been managed really well even during this economic kind of slowdown here and done a lot better than really the industry. So there's an actual investor question from Marni S. asking, could you walk us through the credit capabilities of Affirm? What makes it unique in this current environment with the macro rates or interest rates falling?
Yeah, so, you know, we at Affirm believe that managing credit is always job one for us. And I think that we've built a transactional underwriting model that allows us to be both very nimble, but also sets us apart from some of the other ways that credit is extended to consumers. And so, you know, you think about the average Affirm transaction, it's probably under $300 as of our last quarter. I think it was $280 roughly, and so we really believe that we're extending credit in very small increments and we're able to get a repayment signal from those new loans very quickly. And also the other nice thing about our credit model is that our loans amortize monthly. And so, we're able to stare at a metric internally we call first payment delinquency, right?
So when we originate credit to a new cohort of borrowers, what's the delinquency rate on that first payment that they're making for the new loan? And we have prediction models that we compare to. And when we look at the repayment data, if we see a deviation, an adverse deviation from our expected repayment rates, we're able to be really nimble and we're able to go investigate what's driving those increased delinquencies and we can course correct as needed really rapidly. So I think that gives us a structural advantage versus maybe a credit card model where you're doing an intensive underwriting on a consumer and then you're extending them, you know, several thousand dollars of credit for a multi-year period. We are re-underwriting consumers and re-underwriting the transaction every single time that a consumer requests credit from us.
I think that that's just a structural advantage. And then, because we've been doing this for so long and utilizing this underwriting model for every transaction, we've built a really nice data set. And so we can build more customized credit models for some of our largest programs. That helps give us an advantage, and that helps us, you know, eke out small efficiency gains over time. We're always optimizing the credit decisioning part of our business. And so I think it's just we have a big data set. I think we have a structural advantage in the fact that we're underwriting every transaction, and then we're also extending credit in very small increments, and we have a really high velocity for repayment as well. So that allows us to be pretty nimble.
Yeah, I want to ask about falling interest rates in general. And obviously Affirm is a beneficiary of lower rates, but there's a lot of moving pieces there. So maybe you can walk us through interest rate impacts to the P&L and considerations investors should keep in mind about the sensitivity and timing and any other considerations when you're managing credit.
Yeah, I mean, we fund the business a couple different ways. We use a mix of floating rate debt and fixed rate debt. And so if there were to be a movement in rates, the flow through to us won't be immediate, right? The fixed rate debt will not be repriced with a movement in rates. If and when the fixed rate part of our business comes up for renewal or refinancing, then we would avail ourselves of the lower rates at that time, but it won't be an immediate pass through. So I think that's important to keep in mind. And then, we shared a heuristic, maybe a couple of years ago now actually, just to help investors think about the relationship between a movement in underlying reference rates and then the impact to our business.
And so I think it's important to keep in mind that we have a weighted average term length in our business of just over 12 months. You know, the average loan that we originate with a consumer is just over a year in length. And then because the consumer is paying down principal every single month, the weighted average life or the weighted average amount of time that the loan is outstanding from a dollar perspective ends up being about five months. And so when you think about that relationship between five months and then a 12-month term length, it works out to about a ratio of 0.4. And so a 1% movement in underlying rates should represent about 4/10 of a percentage point benefit to us if rates are going down.
It's important to keep in mind those relationships and just the velocity of repayment that's in our loan book.
Got it. Wanted to get to the profitability side. Affirm's obviously shown some great strides in rapidly improving profitability. Junior V, who's a retail investor, is asking in particular about the path to GAAP profitability by the end of fiscal year 2025. What are some of the areas Affirm has targeted to drive expense leverage and where are some key focus of investment, whether that be marketing, product improvement, et cetera?
Yeah, you know, I, I think we've done a lot over the last nearly two years really to optimize our expense base and to really make profitability in the business and, and maybe even more importantly, efficiency in the business really a North Star for everything that we do. I mean, I, I think if you think about where Affirm is in terms of the industries that we play in and the merchants and partners that we're able to serve, I think growth is always going to be top of mind for us, of course, too. But I think we've proven to ourselves and hopefully proven to investors as well that we can continue to be very growthful, but also drive a really nice level of profitability in the business.
And so if you look at our full year results in fiscal 2024, I think we drove 21 points of margin expansion at the adjusted operating income line. We ended the year with just over 16% adjusted operating margin. We were really proud of that result, but we also know that we're not done. We have, you know, we've put a marker down for fiscal 2025 in terms of our outlook that we're going to be north of 20% on the adjusted operating margin basis. So more improvement, even versus the really nice progress that we made in fiscal 2024. So profitability is a huge part of everything that we do.
I would say, you know, this next step for us of moving from adjusted operating income profitability down to, you know, unadjusted or, or operating income profitability, you know, really the biggest piece that will change for us is, some of the Amazon warrants that have been flowing through our P&L as a non-cash expense. And so they, they get adjusted out for, the adjusted operating income metric. Those will start to fall off. And so we think there's roughly, on, if you look at it on a quarterly basis in Q3 and Q4, we should see roughly $65 million-$70 million of year-over-year decrease on an aggregate basis in each of those quarters for that, a portion of that Amazon warrant expense. So that helps a lot, with the move to what we call GAAP operating income profitability.
That, that's a big part of the assumptions and we call that out as part of the outlook that we put out every quarter. And then frankly, the other part is just continuing to do what we've been doing and do more of it, right? I mean, I think growth for us is a huge part of helping us to scale profitability. Again, I think we've demonstrated that there's a lot of inherent operating leverage in our business model. And that's a core assumption for us is that we continue to grow GMV and we continue to do it in a nicely profitable way. And that profitability will help us clear our operating expense base and result in that operating income profitability in Q4.
Is there any targets for GAAP profitability, like a margin that you plan to get to?
I fully expect that we'll get to that over time, but right now we want to go from negative to positive. I think that's the most important thing for us and that's what we're focused on. I think over time we'll have to think about the right KPIs to include in our outlook. Right now we just want to get to profitability.
Can you remind us on the adjusted operating margin, what were those targets? 'Cause you guys are rapidly improving that.
Yeah, I mean, we, as I mentioned, we've got the fiscal 2025. Just for everyone, we're a June fiscal year. So when I talk about fiscal, that means the period ended June 30th. And so, we expect to be at a minimum of 20% Adjusted Operating Income, as a percentage of revenue in this fiscal year that we're in, fiscal 2025. And then, you know, longer term, we've set an algorithm for long-term profitability, medium-term profitability that is a function of how fast revenue growth is in the business. But if you were to put our guidance for fiscal 2025, for both revenue growth and for Adjusted Operating Margin, you would see that we're operating over and above that algorithm that we shared with investors at our investor forum last November.
We probably need to get back and sharpen our pencils and think about what the long-term margin potential is for this business, but we're definitely committed to continuing to show progress on the adjusted operating margin front, and we don't think that ends in fiscal 2025. We think there's definitely a lot of profitability to come for us as we look ahead.
Got it. Okay. Now I'm going to go to the grab bag of questions, retail investors that I wanted to hit on here, that were asked. Jorge and Ashok T are asking about if Affirm has any plans to expand its other financial service offerings into auto loans, mortgages, or other financial wellness tools.
Yeah, great, great question. And definitely one that we get from institutional investors frequently. I think today, you know, we really are focused on the over $1 trillion of credit card debt that is outstanding with U.S. consumers. We think that's the right opportunity set for us to be playing in and continuing to take share from. Historically, we've said no to doing any form of secured lending, meaning that the good that the consumer is purchasing is collateralizing the transaction. We think we have a competitive advantage with the way that we build our underwriting models and we can do that in the unsecured space as well as anyone, and so we're going to be heads down and focused on what is undeniably an enormous opportunity in the U.S. and also internationally.
But I don't think you should expect to see us move into some of those other forms of lending, particularly anything that is secured.
Got it. Randy L is asking, why would a consumer choose Affirm over other buy now, pay later providers? You know, what's Affirm's competitive advantage? And maybe I'll even extend that to not only the consumer, why consumers choose it, but why do merchants end up choosing Affirm?
Yeah, I mean, I think it starts with the breadth of product offerings that we can bring to bear both for consumers and for merchants. You know, as I mentioned, we have three discrete types of loans. We have Pay in 4 loans, which are very short duration, typically roughly a six-week term for those products. Those are great for smoothing out small purchases, but they don't provide the cash flow smoothing for a consumer for goods that are maybe $700-$1,000 or more. We think they're an important part of what we do and how we engage with the consumer, but we don't think it should be the entirety of what we do. We also offer monthly installment plans that range from a 0% APR all the way up to a 36% APR.
And it's important to remember the 36% APR allows us to be, as inclusive as possible when we're underwriting a consumer and allows us to say yes to, a large percentage of transactions. So I think it's, you know, with that product set, we believe we're able to service, and provide credit for transactions as small as $35 all the way out through, $17,500. And I think that aperture, both from a product perspective, but also from an average order value perspective, that is really unique, versus some of our competitors. The majority of the competitors in the buy now, pay later space that, that we bump into tend to be very, very heavy in terms of Pay in 4 offerings, meaning that they're, they're solving a problem for smaller average order value financing versus what we do, which we think is, is more of a superset of e-commerce purchases.
So I think, I think that's a really unique differentiator. In the most recent quarter, we had roughly 75% of our GMV coming from interest-bearing loans. Another 11% was coming from monthly 0% loans to consumers that were three months or longer in terms of the loan, the loan term. And then we were, we were about 14% Pay in 4. And so that, that mix is almost the inverse of, of what we're seeing from our competitors. And, and I think that's, that's important if you think about it from the merchant perspective, because in a Pay in 4 loan, there's no interest to the consumer, which means that the only revenue that's coming to the issuer of that loan, the buy now, pay later provider, is coming from the merchant.
Some merchants can't afford to pay a merchant discount rate or a percentage of the transaction that is high enough to support, you know, a large Pay in 4 program. So for us, because we have such a wider aperture and such a broader product set, we're able to build financing programs for the merchant that may still include a proportion of Pay in 4, but we're able to also include other more profitable programs. That can smooth out the merchant discount rate that we're charging to the merchant and make it work within their own margin structure and the types of goods that they're selling.
So again, a long-winded way of saying, I think we have the broadest product set and that allows us to be really flexible and to put an offer in front of a consumer that, they're going to take up or even a range of offers in front of a consumer, to give them choice.
Because the take rate is more just a function of what product set and the credit risk you're taking on that? Because you guys have a little more flexibility maybe in take rate than some of the other competitors?
Yeah, I would think about it, you know, most simply as really two sliding scales that are related, right? There's a question of how much interest are we charging to the consumer and in our business that can range from truly zero to a 36% APR. And then once you know the answer to that, right, there's another slider around, okay, what are the economics that we need to get from the merchant to support this transaction and make sure that we're printing, you know, profitable loans for us and meeting our own internal return requirements. And so again, we can be really economically indifferent in terms of the mix of loan products that we're building for a merchant's financing program.
It just comes down to meeting the merchant where they are in terms of their own cost of acceptance targets and their margin structure, and then also making sure that we're putting the right types of offers in front of consumers so that they're saying yes to the offer and that, you know, that's driving conversion for the merchant as well.
Retail investor Peter Z wanted to ask about large banks that he's seeing like Chase are starting to offer pay over time plans for their credit cards, allowing customers to break down purchases in 6, 12, 18 months with zero fees and no interest. Does that trend threaten maybe the future growth of Affirm?
We don't think so. I mean, we think what we do is pretty unique. Most of our large programs feature Affirm very, very up funnel in the consumer purchasing journey. So we like to have prominence all the way up on what we call the product display page. And so as a consumer is thinking about, you know, buying their next TV, they should see the Affirm logo on the page for that television while they're shopping. And the best integrations that we have are calling out not just the fact that Affirm is there and ready and willing to provide credit to the consumer, but also what that purchase is going to mean in terms of the dollars of interest that the consumer should expect to pay and also the monthly payment that the consumer should expect.
So we think that that's the right place for us to be. And that helps the consumer think about how they afford this, not as a one-time outlay, but as part of their monthly budgets and their ability to pay for this over time. I think most of the credit card models that I'm familiar with, where they're taking a purchase that has already happened and then offering differentiated financing terms for that purchase, it just misses out on partnering with the consumer early in their shopping. And we think that's a real advantage for us. And for what it's worth, I think these products have existed for several years and we've seen really nice growth, if not accelerating growth, on the Affirm platform at large.
So, you know, we're really comfortable with our ability to continue to partner with an increasing amount of consumers and to mean more and more to their financial lives.
Got it. Want to ask about the U.K. I know you guys have started processing some merchants, in that country. Can you talk about what makes your product or what's Affirm selling their product to differentiate itself from other BNPL competitors in the U.K.?
Yeah, I mean, I think it's similar to how we look at the U.S. market. I think there's a range of buy now, pay later loan types that are resonating with consumers. I think that we're optimistic that we can bring our expertise in underwriting, especially underwriting higher ticket items and longer dated loans, as well as our capital markets execution to be able to finance the loan book that we're building really efficiently and really profitably, so you know, again, we want to lean into the products that consumers are already utilizing in the U.K., so Pay in 3 is a very popular form of buy now, pay later financing in the U.K. We definitely are going to offer that.
What we've seen so far, and again, it's very early and we shouldn't draw any real conclusions yet, but we are seeing uptake for higher average order values in the market. We do think there's not dissimilar to the U.S. We think there's a nice market opportunity there to support more considered purchases. It's not an accident that we launched with Alternative Airlines, which is a travel provider, as one of our launch partners. So, again, I think there's a lot to like about the market and we think that we can definitely carve out a niche in the U.K.
Adam W and Marni S are asking, what's the next area of expansion outside the U.K.?
Yeah, we, you know, we've been live in the U.K. for, I think, a whole month and a half now, so we've still got plenty of work to do to make that program as large as we think it can be, so we're really excited about scaling. We're very hopeful that we'll be able to partner with some of our larger U.S. merchants and launch U.K.-focused programs in that market as well. You know, the COO at Shopify, Kaz, stood on stage at our investor forum a year ago and pre-announced that Shopify was going to come to the U.K. with Affirm, so we're beyond excited to expand that partnership into a new market.
But, you know, hopefully that's the first of many large partnerships that we're able to launch in the U.K. out of our existing base, but also out of brand new merchants that we haven't partnered with yet. So again, I think we've got our work cut out for us in the U.K. and longer term, you know, we definitely have ambitions to be global in our efforts. And I'm not going to commit to the next new market here, but we don't think we're done with the U.K. market. We think there's definitely more markets to follow.
Got it. Questions on just the Affirm being offering up a B2B product. I know I think you guys announced that last year. Any update on the progress and the opportunity there in B2B?
No, I mean, we have some large programs in B2B today or programs with large merchants is the right way to say it. B2B is not a meaningful part of our overall GMV today. I mean, which is really just a function of the success that we've had on the consumer side of the world. But we have a B2B offering that is live within Amazon. That's an important part of the B2B program for us. You know, Amazon is a very sophisticated platform, obviously. And I think we've learned a lot with the B2B offering that we have with them. And you know, we're happy to see that out in the world. And I think over time, we'll evaluate you know, how big the B2B effort should be for us.
Got it. I got a real-time question coming in asking about how you guys think about the banking partners such as Evolve and Cross River since they're under consent orders. Any issues with kind of the regulatory environment you're seeing with that?
No. I mean, Cross River, you know, has been a long-time partner of ours. They're a partner of ours today, but they also are a pretty small part of our partner bank ecosystem. We use a diversity of partner banks when we're originating monthly installment loans. And we think in almost everything that we do, we think that having a diversity of partners and vendors is just a core part of risk management. And so, yeah, Cross River has been a great partner to us. We have two other large-scale programs with other banks that have been great programs for us as well. And so, we're not worried about anything going on with Cross River. And again, we work with a diversity of partners.
Got it. Questions just asking about how much visibility does the CFO have in a given quarter and then a given fiscal year?
It's never enough, right? Whatever it is, it's never enough.
Yeah. I mean, Affirm is a very, that's a great question. Affirm is a very data-driven company. And so we go out of our way to make sure that we instrument the business and that we have real-time monitoring from a technology perspective to make sure that our site is up and running and doing what it's supposed to do. We're staring at, you know, daily GMV data. So yeah, I would say we're very data-driven and there's a lot of data at our disposal. And I think we do a good job of focusing on the right things and making sure that we're monitoring progress in the business.
I would say, like any business, you know, there's certain data points that can be real-time and there's certain data points that show up on maybe a weekly cadence, a monthly cadence, et cetera. And so, yeah, I think we've got good visibility into the business generally.
Tamelia M is asking that, you know, with the stock performance being, you know, phenomenal, especially over the last few months, how do you plan to, how, how do you move the business forward for the continued success to match the, the stock outperformance?
Oh, I mean, I guess I think about it the other way around, right? I think the stock hopefully has performed because investors are realizing that we've built a really unique asset, that we're a profitable, growthful market leader in what is increasingly a very important part of how consumers are choosing to finance their purchases, right? So we don't. We hope that the stock price appreciation is a function of the business that we've built and also the potential that we see and obviously that investors see for us as well. So we try not to stare too much at the stock price. And I think we've got a really ambitious roadmap, you know, both in the U.S. and in the U.K. and in Canada as well.
We're heads down trying to make sure that we do that work and that we do it as quickly and as efficiently as possible.
Last question for me, Rob, maybe just highlight some of the things you're most excited about that maybe investors are not seeing, you know, on a day-to-day or just things that could make a difference in the future that you think is worth pointing out.
Oh gosh. I mean, I think we covered so much on this call. I mean, I think we're so proud of the results that we've posted, you know, these last several quarters. I think our ability to scale profitability down to the bottom line. I'm really proud of that. And again, with the outlook that we've set for fiscal 2025, we expect to do more of that, and at an increasing rate. The business continues to be really growthful, both in terms of the integrated side of the house with our largest merchants and platforms, but we've also made really great inroads with third-party distribution channels, you know, as I mentioned, the wallets and some of the merchant acquiring relationships that we have too. So, you know, that's all going on and that's all great for the business.
We're deepening our relationship with our best consumers. You know, the growth of Affirm Card can't be overstated in terms of its importance. So it just really feels like the business is firing on all cylinders from both a growth, a profitability, and a consumer perspective. And it's great to see, and I'm honored to be able to stand up here and get to talk about all that.
With that, Rob, we'll keep it there. Congrats on all the success and congrats on the new role. Next time, since we live probably 10 minutes away from each other, we should do this together.
Yeah, absolutely. Thanks, Bryan. Really appreciate all the prep and moderation here.
Yep. All right, Rob. Thanks. Thank you.
Thank you.