Well, welcome everyone. Welcome to the 2026 Affirm Investor Forum for the, we are live here at Nasdaq in New York. We appreciate those of you that are joining us here in person, as well as those you that are joining us virtually. This is the third iteration of our investor forum, and we certainly hope it's our best one yet. As many of you know, I'm Zane Keller, I'm the Head of Investor Relations here at Affirm. Before we begin, we do have to go through a few legal disclosures. Today's presentation may contain forward-looking statements, including projections, estimates, targets, and illustrations, as well as statements regarding the company's strategy, future operations, and partnerships.
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 of the 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. We will have several guest speakers today, as you might imagine. The statements and opinions expressed by these panelists are solely their own, and they do not necessarily reflect the views of Affirm. You should not treat any of their statements as a recommendation to make a particular investment or follow a particular investment strategy. Finally, today's presentation will contain non-GAAP financial measures. These measures should be considered a supplement to, and not a substitute for, GAAP financial measures.
For historical non-GAAP financial measures, reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP measures can be found on our investor relations website. With that, I'd like to introduce the agenda for today. We will begin, of course, with Max Levchin, who will provide an update to the vision for the company as we continue to build the Affirm Network. Afterwards, you will hear from Libor Michalek and Michael, who will speak to our structural advantages and why we believe these give us an enduring competitive advantage. We will then discuss our five medium-term growth drivers. You will notice five instead of three last time. You'll hear from Wayne Pommen, Vishal Kapoor, and Pat Suh, who will delve into each of these five drivers from both a commercial and product perspective.
Finally, Rob and John Marion will close us out with an update on our funding outlook, as well as the all-important update to the medium-term financial framework. With that, let's get started.
Hello. Thank you for showing up. Definitely I was not looking for applause, thank you. We have a lot to go through. I'll try to get through my part quickly. In the next 10 minutes, I will tell you absolutely nothing that'll help you with your spreadsheets. This is the time to dream with me a little bit versus dig deep into the models that are important, I recognize. That is to come. All right, I'll tell you about what we've been up to and where we're headed. If there's one thing you wanna, you should, in my hope, my opinion, you should take away from my talk track is we've built a network.
It's not just a network in the sort of a thrown around all the time, payments accepting term of art. It is a network that is real in a sense that it is fully closed loop. We are both the issuer of credit, the transmitter of the credit information, the acquirer, and the risk manager. We're also unique in a sense that we are fully information preserving. That is to say, merchants and consumers give us a lot more than any other payment network has to benefit from. Most importantly, this really is kind of the whole point of what I'm here to tell you and what my colleagues will do to you know, have so much more to say about, is we are exhibiting very real network effects.
The business should be, in my opinion, of course, judged through that lens from this moment until the rest of this presentation and from now on. Let's start at the beginning. We started Affirm with a mission. The mission is honest financial products that improve lives. I wish I'd thought of a cleverer way of saying this when I wrote it down, but the whole point of having mission and core values is to put them down once and keep them in stone, and that is ours. We mean it. We really mean it. I mean it so much that even for a formal event like this one, where Zane explicitly told me, "Do not wear jeans or T-shirts," I dress up exactly as I do every day, wearing my Affirm logo in multiple parts on my person.
I won't show you the other ones, kidding. I gotta keep the room awake. The reason for this is actually quite selfish. I love the dopamine hit of getting out there and being stopped on the street. Somebody asked me this morning in the gym whether I was the Max Levchin, which was like, I don't know, what was it, what's about to happen? I said, "Love what you have built, love the product. It's just so cool how you guys are building this company." That happens a lot these days.
I don't think a day has gone by over the last, you know, 6 or 12 months where either I didn't have the experience personally or one of my executive team wouldn't come in and say, "Oh my God, I had just the coolest thing." Michael, I'm gonna steal his story because I don't think he's gonna share it. When he was traveling to some place most recently where we met up, he said he had 2 oh my God, I love Affirm moments from 2 flight attendants on 2 different flight legs, which is like, that's a new high. It is a great high. You know, I encourage you to sort of step back and ask yourself what other lending brand you know that engenders love among its customers. I'll wait. I think I'll be waiting a long time.
I don't think this is a common reaction. I think our customers love it, love us for real. That intensity, the approach we take to our products, to the way we treat our consumers, the way we treat our merchants, our capital partners, our investors, that integrity that sort of is the building block is really important to us. It's entirely real. We don't just bring it out sometimes. It is a daily occurrence here. That is where the brand comes from. We spend basically rounds down to $0.00 on brand advertising, and yet we have such a strong consumer preference that comes out in these conversations.
The fundamental insight that we had 15 years ago, which is sort of terrifying to say, I was in my thirties, which is not the case anymore, the world was ready for a better approach to credit. We didn't want to build a product that was just like anyone else. We thought we would have a chance of persuading people to give another way of paying a try by simply telling them the truth, giving them a sense of control, transferring the transparency directly into their hands, and doing it right where they're shopping at the point of sale. Fast-forward to today, we are in more than half a million checkouts online alone. Obviously, offline, Affirm Card works everywhere. We're starting to break out into a thing that everyone has seen, heard of, and for our consumers, a thing they love.
14 years ago, going back to the beginning, I won't trouble you with the names of the merchants because some of them are no longer with us and others are no longer nearly as enormous as some of the ones that we are proud to call customers. We were given a chance by literally, these were friends of mine. I would call them like, "Hey, I got this payments company." Like, "No, not the, not the first one. There's a new one, different really." Say, "I got a, I got a payments idea. Can you put a button on your checkout?" Like, "Oh my God, another button." Like, "No, I really think it'll help." Like, "What do you think will happen?" What happened is what's now known as the Affirm effect.
It's a 30% on average pop in your online conversion. This has been true since the very beginning and varies a little bit. We have different share of card, different, you know, impacts on different kinds, but this is not an outlier. A 30% increase in checkout conversion is a very, very normal thing for a fully integrated Affirm. If you're selling many SKUs, the conversion might not go quite as much, but you would see a doubling of your AOV. Somebody would come in to buy a pair of shoes and would walk out virtually or otherwise with a dress and a pair of shoes and a bag. That has propelled us to incredible growth from the very first point. Like we literally went from, does anybody care to, I think we have a product market fit.
I love to point out to our team and anyone who cares, we have never had to pivot. Like every company, and this is my number nine, I think, I've ever been involved with, we pivoted and pivoted until we found that elusive product market fit. Affirm took about a year wandering through the desert of prototyping and trying to figure out how this thing will work, but once it clicked, it's clicked. We never had to change who we are or how we do business, which is, you know, a blessing for an entrepreneur. That doesn't mean we didn't evolve. We worked very, very hard on every little bit of that Affirm effect. Affirm effect is the checkout experience, the conversion, that is what we are in the business of selling. That means the user interface had to become sharper and sharper.
Like I try to remind our designers and our product managers that we literally bring a chisel to the pixels that we have on checkout and take out any pixel that we don't think has to be there because that's between us and that sale. The other thing is underwriting. Like it's fun, all fun and games if you're a closed loop network. If you're the one managing the risk, which is what happens, even if we sold the risk into capital markets, we are still on the hook because the next sale of the next loan depends on how well we did in the previous one, which means every single transaction has to be underwritten in real time with the tight requirement of the user interface without too many step-up questions or identity confirmation screens.
That loan has to get approved or declined in real time very quickly, and we have to pretty soon then figure out what of the many capital markets channels it's gonna go to. We've had to go from, "Hey, we think we can gather these things up in a spreadsheet and then figure out how we might finance it later," to a giant machine that issues securitizations every month and many, many other channels, and we'll talk our capital markets program in a little while. All of this is only possible if you have data as a first-class citizen. We have built our entire company around managing data, aggregating data, mining data, modeling data, modeling outcomes. The thing that I sometimes like to say is that the product is the rocket ship. You know, we didn't have to pivot. The product worked.
It is the rocket ship, the data is rocket fuel. Like that is what takes us forward. The fancy graphic, those of you who recognize, is of course a neural network. That is what powers the checkout that we have. Affirm checkout is the product. That is the conversion that we sell so well. The optimization function that takes place every time, even before you click on anything, even before you choose to go to Affirm, the list of choices we show you in that moment is powered by a model that was deliberately designed to maximize your interest as a shopper, to minimize the cost that the retailer incurs to maximize your interest, to produce the best possible financial outcome for you, the consumer because if you're not gonna pay us on time, we will lose money because there are no late fees.
We've never charged a penny and never will. To make sure that we have the yield for the capital markets expectations that we have probably negotiated months in advance with a rate that has since been modified by the Fed's funds rate. All of this happens before we know who you are, if you're not logged in. If you are, we have some incremental data. The amount of AI-ing, for lack of a better term, that takes place in this checkout is astounding. The thing that I will tell you because Libor, who will come right after me, is too modest to brag, we've been building these models for 15 years from the very beginning. The company was founded by a bunch of computer scientists who basically thought that we could do better than FICO because, you know, more data, better techniques.
The last year and a half or so, we've been working on a completely different class of models inspired by what you encounter when you talk to ChatGPT or Gemini. It's a transformer-first model with an attention mechanism that drives everything from selection of terms to underwriting. You will see the results which are quite phenomenal, but that should give you a flavor for just how much time and effort we put and how seriously we take the idea that this business only makes sense with the level of machine learning and AI that we have in our DNA. The reason this is more important to us from the consumer's perspective obviously makes sense. We want people to feel great. We want them to have the sense of control. We want them to get the best deal possible.
The wrinkle that I sort of referred to on the merchant side is actually worth pausing for a second. When you see a 0% deal, when you see an APR that compares very favorably to your credit card APR, someone is paying for a time value of money. It's not us. It is typically coming out of the marketing budget of the merchant, and we are the steward of that capital, which means that for every penny they're putting into our model, we have to show them, and we have to feel great about the fact that we're maximizing their yield on marketing investment. That is a fairly profound responsibility to take on, in addition to all the other responsibilities that we take.
On the flip side, though, we've gotten very, very good at this, and the giant stack of custom pricing contracts that give us the right to tap into these marketing budgets in real time is the moat that Affirm has created just on that side of the business. Trying to replicate has been very challenging for our competitors, as you may have noticed. In part, that's because we've built these trusted relationships with consumers. We've built a great brand. We do have brand preference at this point, but we also have a deep sense of trust and care with the merchants that we have these custom pricing, and we've been leaning into 0% financing, as you have seen obviously over the last couple of quarters. All of that comes from these contracts, and it's a profound differentiation that we have across the whole industry.
I love this animation, so admiring it for a second. All this was created with AI way too quickly. Frees up our designers to actually build products that require human involvement. As we increase our transaction count, transaction per active user per unit time, has a really nice consequential effect on the data aggregation side, which translates to visibility. We understand the consumer that much more. We have less period of waiting between loans, more time or more data to understand who that person is, better understanding for exactly what drives them when shown 3 different financing programs. Are they going to accept the first, the second or the third? We have a model that reorders which ones you will see first. We know where your eye will trend. We know what you will click on based on previous transactions.
The more transactions we have, the faster the flywheel of the Affirm network growth spins. Higher frequency, of course, gives us better share of wallet of that consumer, makes us more relevant to the merchant. The goal of Affirm has always been to become as important to merchants as Visa, Mastercard, American Express, the great American payment networks. We're getting there by building out this network, by experiencing these network effects. The more we have of everything in the network, the easier, perhaps controversially, it is for us to grow because we become that much more relevant to merchants. More and more people stopping me in the street saying, "Hey, I love Affirm." That means they're telling their merchants either directly or indirectly, "You should accept Affirm if you aren't yet," which is, fortunately for all of us, a diminishing number of people who have not yet integrated.
We've underwritten 70 million Americans. We've transacted with more than half of them. If you've seen our latest quarterly numbers, you can see that the second number is a little bit more than the ones that transacted in the last 12 months. The opportunity to decrease the gaps between transactions to increase the frequency is still very, very substantial. The Affirm consumer is real. She does in fact exist. She has her preferences. A very large retailer decided to remove Affirm from an integrated checkout a little while ago, and the expectation, certainly according to our stock price movement, was that we'll just lose the volume and that's gonna be that. That is not what in fact happened.
A large percentage, a large majority, in fact, of the shoppers from said retailer simply went out and got themselves Affirm Cards and continue to today to access Affirm at the point of sale online and offline using Affirm Cards, fully benefiting from all the Affirm Card functionality. The volume at that retailer continues to grow for us, which not what was, I think many people thought was in the cards. We have 27 million active consumers in the last 12 months period. 15 million of those are in our app every single month. That has now become a big enough surface where marketers, not just those who are paying for these 0% deals or discounted APR deals, any marketer within any retailer can come to us and say, "Hey, I would love to tell our story. I would love to launch a product.
I would love to do something with you guys. The audience is so big. We know we are seeing them on every channel integrated through digital wallets, through the Affirm Card. Obviously, that, you know, wasn't sitting idle as an idea for too long. We decided, you know what, we're gonna have our own shopping event. People don't come to us to pick the thing they're gonna buy. They definitely come to us with a view, "I'm gonna buy a thing. I'd like to know which retailer will offer me 0% financing," which is why we invented this thing called The Big Nothing, which if you know the Affirm team, you know we love our silly puns and take ourselves extremely unseriously. The Big Nothing, the latest one will launch tonight. This was sort of a coincidence.
I'm not sure we meant for it to be at this event. I'm here to tell you, if you're in the market for just about anything, there are thousands, maybe tens of thousands now, of retailers that are going to gladly pay your interest for you, and you can find it all in the Affirm app starting midnight tonight and will go for three days. Last time we did this, which was October, we moved the needle for participating merchants north of 30% and it had no pull forward effect, which is what retailers hate because if they promote something today and the transaction goes away tomorrow, they don't exactly love it. We waited this long to do another one because we wanted to make sure it's very clear there's no pull forward. These transactions were an expression of preference as opposed to just switch.
More Big Nothings coming up. My reaction to the Big Nothing numbers was, "Well, why don't we do this every week?" I've been overruled, but we're definitely gonna do more of these. I'll promise I'll get off stage in a second, but I have to mock the shorts a little bit. The best bear case for Affirm has been it's all the credit risk and no consumer preference. Like, hopefully, I've beaten the consumer preference horse to death right in front of you here. Like, we really do have consumer preference. People will actively switch to our card only to counterweigh the fact that a merchant decides to no longer support Affirm. Our merchant churn is boils down to effectively zero because most merchants are very clear that they have to support Affirm. Our logo is important to them.
That said, the one thing that I will not try to dispute or combat here. The credit risk is real. Like, Michael wanted to write our S-1 starting with the sentence, "We take risk," which I thought was amazing, and of course, the legal team had its way with it. I love our legal team. I mean that. I nerd out with them as much as I nerd out with the engineers. The credit risk is a thing that we take on proudly. You've seen the results. You can see it every month in all of our security. We've done a pretty amazing job. Credit is job number zero at Affirm. I, as an engineer, count from zero. It will always be there.
The thing about the scale of the network is three, four years ago, when we had just gone public, I entertained a bunch of investors and one of them said, "Oh, you guys, you know, is $100 billion, is that like a thing? Is that gonna happen?" We know we're dangerously close to $50 billion in trailing 12 months. At this point, the debate has shifted when do you get to $100 billion, not if you get to $100 billion, which, you know, I'm pleased to welcome everyone to that way of thinking. That said, if it takes us a little bit longer to get to the milestone, which I think is entirely unavoidable in a good way, we will take as long as we must.
We will not compromise the credit quality, the trust we've built with capital markets just to achieve some kind of a gaudy GMV number. That was important to say. That said, I said it, but I'll say it again, the other takeaway is it is easier to grow now that we're larger, which I think for most businesses is actually the other way around. Not for businesses that exhibit true network effects. Merchants now reach out to us saying things like, "A few years ago, we told you guys BNPL was not a thing. It is a thing and we want it.
Where do we sign up?" Even weirder version of this is they say, "Hey, we definitely wanna sign up, but could you integrate us into your app before we go live because we wanna tap into your audience 'cause we want to start using you as a marketing channel?" Which is great 'cause it's a new revenue stream for us. Just 2 more sort of nuggets to it. The last 12 months, trailing 12 months looking back, 5 cohorts, that's as far as I looked, every 1 of those, the transactions per user grew faster than the 1 before. The flywheel is just spinning faster on its own. The most we're doing to increase transactions in the network is just signing up more retailers. If you look at card cohorts, every new cohort is starting a little bit higher than the last.
It's spending a little bit more. Again, we're not telling them, "Please spend more. We need to show good numbers." It is happening on its own. Took us about 1 year. Actually, no. It took us more than 2 years to get from 2 transactions per user to 3 transactions per user. We've just gotten from 6 to 7 in less than 1 year. Again, another sign that the network is just spinning. We're gaining share of mind, we're also gaining share of wallet. The audience is now big enough where we're fielding millions of searchers in our app alone for brands that support Affirm. That is a great sales tool. I frequently go to a merchant that hasn't yet seen the light and say, "You know, you may not care about us, but our users do care about you.
Here's $100 million of GMV that we fielded from our app. People search for you specifically in the context of Affirm. We should do something. I can drop a bunch of brands that have literally seen the light with that sales talk track. Anyway, I'll stop beating the network effects are real horse in front of you here. That is the only thing that I'm here to tell you. As is my last slide in front of you. The one on your left is a throwback. This is from our very first fundraising deck. That's why the Affirm logo is outdated. From the very beginning, the vision that, you know, no pivots, we had said we want to be on every door.
We want to be a must-accept payment mark, as important to retailers as Visa and Mastercard. I wouldn't quite go as far as to declare victory right now, but we are really well on our way, and all signs point to the fact that this is happening. Consumers love us. Again, I love Affirm as something that I love hearing, but I hear more and more often, and just fills my heart with joy. I wouldn't steal Vishal's thunder, so I'm not gonna rattle off all the things we're gonna build, but kind of the themes to focus on growth. It is easier to grow when you're getting bigger. We are still very focused on growing. Modular credit, modulo, keeping extremely close eye on everything from capital markets, downstream concerns there, all the way to making sure that we never overstep our credit requirements.
Growth is still very, very top of mind. That means more channel partnerships, more ISVs. We'll talk a little bit about Affirm Edge, the official renaming of Affirm ACDC. We did not want to get sued by the band. If you don't know what that means, don't worry about it. You'll see what that is in a second. Agentic, it's everyone's topic apropos our morning's release. We are getting fully integrated into Gemini. That's not the only one, but this morning, that's the one we're talking about. We're very focused on direct to consumer. The card is now a big enough part of our business that we're recognizing that we are not actually serving every economic strata the way they want to be served with our card.
That just creates more opportunity for us to go build some more software, which is exciting. Our card is a dumb piece of plastic with an extremely sophisticated set of features in the app, and that's exactly what we're digging deeper and deeper into. Finally, again, a little trite, I refer you to my shareholder letter if you really want to see what that means, but AI is a superpower. This is a moment where the world is divided into companies run by engineers and companies that are trying to figure out how are the companies run by engineers leapfrogging them. We are very fortunately in the former. The founding team were all engineers. Pretty much every executive team member writes code either for their job or to make sure their job is a little bit more fun.
We are firmly in the engineering mindset and we're loving every moment. You know, don't take no AI layoffs as what they're being portrayed to be. Those of us who know how to build software love having people who can direct AI. I'll leave it there. Anyway, Affirm logo on every door. We're not there yet, but we're getting closer and closer. It's very exciting. With this, I will leave you in the capable hands of Michael and Libor, my two co-conspirators on just about everything we do. Please welcome them to the stage.
We're on it.
They're good men and thorough.
We will do our best to get back on time here. He is not into brevity.
Brevity.
Thank you all so very much for being here today. I really appreciate you making the trip and listening to us yap a little bit about what's going on at Affirm. I'm up here on stage with my friend and colleague and fellow pirate, Libor. We're gonna walk through how we see our structural advantages and why we think they point to long-term durable growth with really compelling unit economics. Before I dive into the structural advantages of the business, we thought we'd take a second and put a framework out there for you to think about the way those advantages show up in the form of 2 reinforcing flywheels. The left-hand side, we talk about a lot.
That is our merchant and consumer network, where as we get more consumers and delight them with transactions, they get more value out of the network. Merchants want to be able to participate in that network, allows us to attract more merchants, who in turn give more value to the consumers. The two reinforce each other. We spend a little bit less time in these forums talking about the right-hand side, but it's very important and we're going to talk quite a bit about it today. That is our approach to risk management and how we vertically integrated, across credit, capital, and everything that we need to do in order to scale the business. The key thing here is, as we get more transactions on the network, we get smarter.
Our capital partners can have more confidence in the level of credit losses that we underwrite, thereby generating more returns, which in turn help us deliver better offers to our merchant and consumer partners. These two flywheels really do work together, and you don't have the business without both. Thinking about our advantages, five we'll walk through today. I'll walk through them all in the, in the following slides, but I'll quickly introduce them. I'll hit the first one and let Libor take the rest, and then we'll come back and talk about the way they show up. The first is network effects. Max talked a lot about that. We talk a lot about that in our business.
As our business scales, it gets more valuable for all participants in the network, making our job to grow the business and network easier as we get bigger. The second, again, we talk about a lot, which is that we have transaction-level underwriting. Cannot repeat enough how important transaction-level underwriting applied to short duration loans fundamentally changes the outcomes on credit. The third is our data asset. Our data asset is unmatched in the industry. We've been at it for quite some time. Models are all the rage. They need data, otherwise they can't function, and we have a data asset that cannot be matched. The models themselves, fourth, are not as interesting as the way you operate them.
We can both update the models and again, make decisions in throughout the course of a particular period to make sure that we're engineering the right outcomes for our capital partners, our merchant partners, and our consumers. Lastly, our infrastructure scale. We have built a robust and reliable platform that allows us to serve the most demanding and largest e-commerce players in the world. That is a real strategic asset for us. Let's think about the network effects. Here we got some data. 71 million underwritten consumers all-time, a little over 0.5 million merchants. That's the merchant and consumer side of the network generating a tremendous amount of transactions. As more merchants get on the platform, consumers can get more value. As more consumers are on the platform, merchant gets better sales.
They can get value out of Affirm both in terms of higher conversion, larger average order values, and then obviously, delighted customers. We make their customers very happy for what we're able to do for them. We don't spend as much time talking about the network effects that we see across the broader ecosystem. Our capital partners who benefit from the scale that we create return that with better cost of funds that we can then build really compelling products for the consumers and the merchants, making our growth easier. Scale begets scale, and scale begets economics in our business. The result of these complicated and finely tuned systems of interactions is a very complicated, yet very powerful machine. When tuned correctly, Affirm can generate really large scale, lots of growth, and a lot of delighted and happy customers throughout the process.
I'm gonna walk it or hand over to Libor to talk about underwriting and infrastructure.
Thank you, Michael. Really appreciate it. Transactional-level underwriting. By engaging consumers to evaluate their repayment options and pricing as a part of their purchase, we create the opportunity to individually underwrite every single transaction, which enables more accurate risk evaluation and real-time pricing, greater clarity, and of course, improved conversion, AOV, and repayment on the consumer's part. As a result of underwriting each individual transaction, compared to a model that is product-agnostic, all-or-nothing approvals, Affirm is able to deliver significantly better approvals for the same delinquency rate or much better delinquencies for the same approvals. For example, this graph compares using Affirm to FICO across a large set of our transactions based on a specific delinquency target where we pick it.
We are able to deliver significantly greater approvals at target economics, process more transactions, collect even more performance data, and satisfy more merchants and consumers in the process. Through a vertically integrated product and transactional underwriting together, we are able to collect more data to train our models. We develop a clear picture of each user's behaviors, finances, choices at the time of the transaction. We are able to acquire rich data across the full journey of the purchase. Everything from offers they saw, the merchants that they considered, the terms that we offered them, what they chose, and then how they repaid those installments. This includes category, merchant, item-specific data.
For example, in travel, the time from when the customer made the purchase to when the trip actually happens as it relates to the length of the loan is a huge signal on repayment and ultimately approvals as well. Vertical integration drives visibility into user choice and outcomes. Over the last 14 years, we've seen $150 billion in volume, 2.3 billion repayments continually increasing the scale of data on which we train our models. As we've grown our consumer and merchant network, we've steadily grown the number of loans and the number of repayment installments we use to train each successive generation of model. Additionally, through research and experimentation and development, we've steadily also increased the number of features describing those purchases and those repayments, resulting in an acceleration of the combined number of loans, installments, features.
The full data set that we use to train each individual model has continued to increase. As we've increased the scale of our model training data, as the product evolves, the models learn new behaviors and interactions differentiating how people respond to distinct offers and how that impacts their repayment to consistently deliver better performance. Now, normally on these graphs, people like to show like area under the curve, and it's really hard to kind of normalize that. What we decided, or I is to look at like delinquencies as it relates to approvals, right? We see the same effect across two distinct classes of models here, our repeat model and our new user model. Each successive generation is delivering better approvals at the same delinquency level or better delinquencies at the same approval.
That differentiation across generations on the right side of each graph gets better and better and the most pronounced in discovering the strongest consumer segments where we get the best repayment. We're also very excited, super excited, with our latest AI model form using a transformer-based architecture. That it is delivering, more It is basically discovering more pockets of opportunity more deeply in our data, especially in making dimension a first-class feature. We're able to actually, in using our existing data, finding new information within it using transformer-based architecture. It's actually shown here. The even though the model, it's on the top, the green line, was released shortly before our main line model as an experiment, it's already significantly outperforming the model that actually went out a month later, which is the red line.
It's the form that we're going to be transforming, transitioning all of our models to. This creates a new baseline for us to continue delivering improved performance with each new model generation, and of course, with even more data. This flywheel of data acquisition is steadily converted into better models which drive improved customer and merchant outcomes, which in turn drives more data, research, and model gains. Being able to underwrite every transaction and price every offer creates better outcomes for consumers and merchants. Being able to do it quickly and reliably is an obligation we take seriously. We're not just matching a transaction to a credit line. The full underwriting ensemble of models, policies, pricing, all of it has to work quickly and correctly every single time. We spend a lot of time analyzing, obviously, performance of underwriting.
We obsess just as much about delivering that capability consistently and reliably every single time. For example, during this past, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, we managed peaks of 4,000 checkouts and 14,000 app opens every single minute, all with a consistently high reliability, and our merchants and customers rely on us, and we take that trust seriously. Speaking of merchants, Michael?
We've got to walk through a few proof points of these advantages that we discussed. The first is the size and scale of our merchant network. Obviously, we're really proud of the distribution that we already have, and we think it's a market-leading position. We work across nearly all verticals, all merchant sizes, and merchant types, from the world's largest e-com players to the small shops on Shopify. Our platform can integrate, be integrated with directly with merchants, and we can deliver great economics when we do that, or we can use partners to integrate any way the merchant sees fit. We wanna help meet the merchant wherever they are and find the consumers wherever they are.
The list here is obviously just a narrow slice, and we're adding more merchants every day, but we're really proud of the scale that those, the merchants in our platform that benefit our consumers. Again, the merchants will get bigger baskets, better conversion. We're a payment method to them, we're a marketing method for them, and it's all wrapped up in a lot of customer love. Merchant network is great. We also have some receipts, so to speak, on how we think about the outcomes on credit in the capital markets. We decided to try to visualize for the investor base here our static ABS deals over the past several years since 2023. Two big insights here. You know, the first is, if you look at the top line, that's where we price the deal.
When we begin a deal, we tell the market that we expect this level of losses, and the curves should look like the top line. The line below is a mixture of the realized losses and then a projection where we don't have the realized losses fully in yet. It's incredible our ability to dial in the losses consistent with the pricing assumptions 3 years out. Affirm's ability to price credit correctly creates a real differentiation that allows our capital partners to trust that the way in which we approach losses will be consistent and just under the assumption that we put out there. That trust shows up as real economic advantage for Affirm. On the left-hand side, you see the credit spreads for the past several years of our ABS deals.
We were running in the 300 basis point context back in 2023. We're running in the 100 basis point context today. I don't think I have to tell this group what 200 basis points of funding cost does to our business. It's pretty powerful in terms of a tailwind and what we can do. When you also combine that with our other advantages, the transaction-level underwriting, models that can price risk correctly, having that extra capacity to invest in the merchants and the consumers allows us to be very growthful, and again, makes our job a lot easier. It's not just the ABS markets. On the right-hand side, you see the forward flow markets. The ability for Affirm to attract capital from some of the world's best investors from pension plans to insurance funds to, yes, asset managers, is remarkable.
We've been able to do it while building real scale in the platform because of the durable advantages that we talked about. Put simply, our investors trust us, and it shows up with the results. Speaking of trust
Thanks. This trust and confidence is also seen in consumer engagement. While we've scaled to 27 million annual active users, we have seen a steady increase in user engagement, capturing a greater share of their considered purchases. Since the last investor forum, we've increased the number of transactions per customer per year by 50% and now sitting at 6.7 transactions per active customer. These improvements are being driven through the expansion of our merchant network, improvements to risk management, consumer retention, and significant continued growth in Card users. The increase in active consumers and number of transactions per user also reinforces our positive impact on merchants, the underwriting and repayment data we collect, and the trust we build with consumers. AI is only accelerating these flywheels.
Most exciting parts of the business are what AI is starting to do for us. For underwriting, AI drives improvements that increase the salience of our data, transformer-based models being better incorporating the time, thereby significantly increasing the complexity of the feature set from our existing data. AI improves the operational cadence of everything from model building, servicing, pricing, offer creation, to collections and capital allocation, and of course, engineering productivity. Similarly, consumer and merchant personalization also becomes richer. For consumers, we are providing a more tailored experience in everything from search all the way through to the customer support experience.
For merchants, we are providing optimized customization, optimizations customized to their business and to their customer base to deliver even better results for the same budget and to make even more efficient use of their incremental promotional budget. We're only at the beginning and could not be more excited about what AI is gonna do for the business. With that, I will hand it back to Zane to tell us about our next speaker.
Thank you, Libor. Michael. Okay, we've heard from Max about the update to our vision, and also most recently, our structural advantages. Now we'd like to go into the five different growth drivers that we have. To kick us off, we're gonna begin with Wayne Pommen, who's our Chief Revenue Officer. Please give him a round of applause.
All right. Thank you, Zane. Affirm's first ever transaction was at a merchant point of sale. It was an online order from a flower delivery merchant. 14 years after our founding and hundreds of millions of transactions later, merchant point of sale remains our foundation. Our direct-to-consumer business is growing very quickly, which you're gonna hear more about later. In the last quarter, point of sale still represented 76% of our transactions. Every year, we welcome thousands of new merchants onto the platform. We grow our volumes with partners that we already have, and as we do that, we meet millions of consumers at the point of sale and welcome them into our network. Ultimately, this core of our business is a very strong growth engine. Over the past 3 years, it's grown at 32% annually.
As I'm going to try to lay out in the next few minutes, in some ways, we think we're still just getting started. You heard a moment ago from Michael and Libor about the structural advantages that we have in our business. Those are also the underpinning of the value that we deliver to merchants and distribution partners. That includes our ever-growing consumer network and the propensity of those consumers to transact with us. You heard about our credit decisioning, our transaction level decisioning, which drives superior conversion and AOV results for retailers. Our data asset supports delivering the right offer to the customer at the right time to drive traffic and again, conversion. Our ever-evolving models, the power of our models, drives ongoing increases in performance, but also importantly, sustainability of results for retailers.
You also heard about our enterprise infrastructure, which delivers the scale that our largest retailers require, especially in their big moments each year, and it also supports the depth and the velocity of our product. As these structural advantages compound, so too does the value that we can deliver to the merchant network. As a reminder, we think about our merchant point of sale strategy in 3 broad pillars: signing up new merchants and entering new verticals, then once the merchants are on our platform, growing our share, and then thirdly, working with distribution partners to accelerate distribution, especially in the long tail. I'll go through each of these in turn. First, new merchants and verticals. In the past year, we've accelerated our merchant acquisition significantly.
We added 157,000 new merchants to the platform in the past 12 months. We've more than doubled our active merchant count since 2023. That, again, is driven especially by expanded distribution into the SMB segment through wallets, payment service providers, and ISVs, which I'll speak more about in a few moments. I wanna zoom in for a moment on the U.S. enterprise segment, which drives the majority of our point of sale GMV. We carefully track the top 250 e-commerce and travel merchants in the United States, e-commerce and travel being the original core markets that Affirm was focused on. In the past 3 years, we integrated an additional 32 of these merchants, including many household names that we're very proud to be partnered with across multiple categories of retail, reaching a total of 75.
Of course, when we look at this chart, we see more opportunity than accomplishment. There's 175 merchants in this sample we have not yet integrated with, and that's something that my team is focused on every day. Also important to remember, though, that we don't need an integration with a merchant for our customers to transact with us there because of our direct-to-consumer channels. If you look at that 175 merchants that we are not integrated with, we drove $3.3 billion of GMV in the last 12 months with those merchants through our direct-to-consumer channels, and that nearly doubled over the last year.
If we then look at our market penetration in GMV terms, the scale of how much opportunity we still have really comes into focus. Again, looking at these original core markets of e-commerce and travel in the U.S., those end markets are growing between 2020 and 2025. They grew 1.7 times to reach $1.6 trillion. In the same time period, Affirm grew over sevenfold, we gained share rapidly. Yet we're not even at a 3% penetration of these core markets, and we think we're far from any sort of ceiling, even in these core markets that we've been in for over a decade now. What if we look beyond those original markets?
The US consumer spends trillions of dollars more in other areas of the economy where our product is also valuable to them. We see this every day with the Affirm Card when somebody uses it to make a healthcare purchase or to pay for a professional service or to make a charitable donation. We are also now integrating with these types of merchants as well. We have a team that focuses exclusively on entering new verticals and laying out the go-to-market strategy, and as a result, we're growing in these adjacent verticals very quickly, approaching $2 billion a year. We think the opportunity ahead is enormous. Now we'll come on to the second pillar, growing share of cart.
We always say that when we sign up and onboard a merchant, that's just the beginning of our opportunity to work with that merchant and to drive more impact for them and for their customers. Share of cart is something we track very closely by comparing our GMV to the total sales of our integrated merchant partners. These figures you see here are again from the U.S. enterprise segment, where we've steadily increased our share over time. In the last quarter, we processed 2.9% of those partners' total sales. This is a very powerful lever. When we look across our total merchant portfolio, every 1 basis point increase in penetration is worth over $120 million of annual GMV.
To accomplish this, we have a well-established playbook of initiatives and enhancements that we work with merchants to deploy throughout the customer journey to drive awareness, engagement, and ultimately conversion. More broadly, we continue to invest in our checkout product with the goal of having the best and highest performing checkout experience available. Last quarter, we announced Boost AI. Boost AI allows merchants to take even more advantage of Affirm's machine learning capabilities. With Boost AI, merchants can work with us to determine the optimal set of program parameters to drive conversion and return on their spend with Affirm. Boost AI has now been adopted by 57% of our merchant partners, enterprise partners, sorry, and rolled out to tens of thousands of SMBs.
We're also rolling out an offering we call Connected Accounts. That's where we work with merchants to recognize returning users when they first arrive on a merchant's site. We can make them aware of their purchasing power, affordability, any personalized offers. Because we already know who they are, they can skip steps in checkout for a faster, smoother, higher converting experience. This is now live with some of our largest merchant partners. In the same vein, we're rolling out embedded checkout. The idea here is we no longer want consumers to have to complete the checkout process in a separate window. We want to keep them natively in line on the merchant site, again, for the most seamless, fastest, highest converting experience we can produce.
This is a sample of some very recent developments, but by no means are we stopping there with our checkout product. When we put all of this together, when we add our share of cart playbook with our track record of merchant retention, we end up with a consistently strong net expansion rate. Over the past 15 quarters, it's averaged 116%. When we look back at the different vintages of merchants that have come onto our platform, we see solid annual growth in each of them over time. The third pillar, accelerating distribution through partnerships. As a reminder, our partnerships take several forms.
There are e-commerce platforms where we have integrations with 55 different platforms, large and small, payment service providers, PSPs, where we have partnerships with 18 different ones, and also wallets and browsers bring us to the checkout as well. We want to go deeper on PSPs for a moment, as these have become a much more important distribution partner for us in the past few years. We're now working with the leading PSPs to bring Affirm to their merchants. It's more than about just having Affirm technically available at checkout. It's increasingly about working with these platforms on a joint product to maximize our performance on those platforms and increasingly about doing joint go-to-market to maximize our reach on those platforms. For example, co-selling together to large merchants or having default on motions for the long tail. We're seeing the results.
Our GMV originated through PSP partnerships is growing much faster than our business as a whole. PSPs are also bringing us access to ISVs, you know, AKA vertical SaaS. SMBs in many verticals now rely on ISVs for a range of software-based services, including payments. Often through one integration with a PSP like Stripe or Adyen, we can partner with ISVs and serve large numbers of underlying merchants efficiently. We now have over 50,000 ISV merchants live and active on our platform. Because most ISVs operate outside e-commerce and travel, ISVs have become a critical part of our strategy to enter those adjacent verticals that I spoke about a moment ago. We're now partnered with leading ISVs in each of the categories you see here, that includes Intuit, which we were very excited to launch just a few weeks ago.
I wanna close on the PSP topic by highlighting a partnership with Stripe. We started that partnership in fiscal 2022, and we've driven enormous growth together since then. We've done that very intentionally, deepening that partnership as we've gone along. For example, we've expanded into Canada. We launched support for ISVs a couple of years ago. We became a preferred partner of Stripe, which unlocked much closer go-to-market cooperation. We launched in as part of Stripe's in-store terminal product. More recently, we've been working very closely with Stripe on agentic capabilities, such as their shared payments tokens program. We're very excited about all of this progress with Stripe. We think it's still very early days given the scale of their platform, and we see much more opportunity ahead.
For our next segment, we're gonna go a little bit deeper on our Stripe partnership. Max spoke with Will Gaybrick, Stripe's President, for a pre-recorded fireside chat.
Let's talk about Affirm and Stripe. How do you distinguish yourself from others? What is it that makes Stripe unique and special and perhaps relevant to us? How do you choose your partners? How does your unique approach to payment shape who you partner with and how?
Well, thanks for having me. Very excited to be here.
You're welcome.
love our partnership. I'd say one of the things that's very foundational to our partnership is that focus on growth, you know, credit being the fuel for the global economy, and now Stripe and Affirm coming together to offer super seamless, you know, both for the developers integrating them and of course, for consumers adopting them, credit offers, right in checkout. You know, it's been like 4 years that we've been partnering, over the past year we've seen, you know, a really, really nice looking curve. I think it's just the beginning.
We are measuring our scale of the partnership, the GMV of the partnership in billions of dollars. You know, from your side of the fence, what have you seen? How have we worked together? What's been the unlock? You're right, we were both looking at this graph and boy, it looks good.
It looks really good. Yeah. Probably two primary dimensions. One is, you know, making Affirm ship natively with Stripe. I think that's probably the best way to describe it, which is you integrate Stripe and you just get Affirm. Now, of course, you can turn it off, but, you know, users don't do that.
You probably shouldn't. You shouldn't.
Yeah. It drives a ton of growth, a ton of conversion. The other side of that, for consumers, just the front-end experience of using Affirm on Stripe is hyper optimized. It's just a couple of clicks. You get your offer, you know, right, in situ and you're off to the races.
What are you seeing? You are a platform, you're a platform of platforms. How does demand for Affirm's product appear? What's the shape of that on the Stripe side?
Stripe is just relentlessly focused on increasing conversion rates for our customers, the calculus for Affirm is just very simple. You know, you turn on Affirm and conversion rates go up. Offering consumers just great credit products right there at checkout just works. We see across, you know, major global e-commerce users, marketplaces like Turo, SeatGeek, it's all the same value prop, just higher conversion, more revenue. Merchants are happy.
We've done a really strong push into vertical SaaS/sort of ISV world, which is a place of strength obviously for Stripe and has been from inception. I'm curious how that has done for you guys in as it relates to us, but also just generally.
I've seen SaaS platforms really thrive, and as you mentioned, you know, serving software platforms, vertical SaaS, you know, for a particular part of the economy or horizontal SaaS for e-commerce platforms like Shopify or Squarespace, that's been something that we've really focused on, you know, for the past decade. We have 16,000 platforms running on Stripe, and 1 thing we've seen, is that Affirm is a really big driver for growth for these platforms in 2 ways. 1 is it drives conversion, so you just have, you know, more success at checkout. You're an e-commerce platform. You have an SMB selling goods, you know, to consumers, just those purchases are succeeding more often because Affirm is integrated.
Because Affirm is driving that uptick in conversion, the platform itself is actually making more margin. The platform monetizes better. It's really a win-win-win. You know, consumers are happy, the SMBs are more happy, and the platform is thrilled to be monetizing better.
Let us talk a little bit about agentic. It is the talk of the town, we will be remiss if we don't address it, and you guys are extremely active in the space, have partnerships-
Yep
with just about everyone. What are you seeing? What's real, what's not? What's coming tomorrow? What's coming who knows when?
I think it's hard to overestimate the impact of agents being responsible for the majority of transactions on the internet, and I really think they will be. Like, I just think that the experiences of delegating, slogging through websites and forms and so on is coming, you know, whether it's browser automation or new protocols. The big insight is just that rather than, you know, our fingers and eyes, navigating the internet, agents are gonna do it for us. For us in our partnership, it's really just how should we think about credit, and conversion on new surfaces? These new surfaces aren't necessarily the same shape as the ones we've seen in the past.
One of the things that I'm excited about in the partnership is to work with a highly technical company like Affirm to figure out how should payment methods be exposed to agents? How should we think about how they're integrated into hybrid experiences where, you know, humans are in the loop, but agents are maybe initiating transactions?
What's next for you guys? Where, where are you headed?
One of our major priorities is always to accelerate the rate of sort of global expansion for businesses. One thing that, you know, excited that we're doing together is we're going to the U.K. together, which is great. Affirm in the U.K. on Stripe is gonna be exciting.
It's good to always have another-
About our merchant point of sale business, which is, as Wayne mentioned, our core business today, and still by far the most amount of GMV that we're generating. We're now gonna shift gears a little bit and move on to some of the product initiatives that we believe will be our growth drivers for the future. I'm gonna invite on stage our Chief Product Officer, our Head of Products, Vishal Kapoor, and he's going to talk to you about the combination of the Affirm consumer ecosystem, the cornerstone of which is Affirm Card. He's also gonna talk to you about our more nascent efforts, I'd say, within both agentic commerce, as well as some of the other initiatives we have. With that, we'll play a short introduction video, and then he will take the ball from there.
All right, folks. My team would like to remind you that no music artists were harmed in the production of that video. That was all AI generated by me over the weekend, so if you liked it, you can give me credit. If not, then we can move on. All right. Wayne just described the first chapter of Affirm. That was how we built a powerful business for our merchant partners. The next chapter for us is putting Affirm in every hand, in every wallet, in every shopping conversation, and every banking app. I'm Vishal. I lead the product and design teams here at Affirm, and I'm excited to tell you four bets that are gonna take us there. First, with Affirm Card, how we are reimagining a card, credit cards which they could build.
The second is we take that same card, and we put in every single digital wallet out there. Third, how we're not just situated to play in agentic commerce, but how we are situated to actually win it outright. The last, how we will integrate our, Affirm structural advantages into a place where millions of Americans already bank, which is with their trusted banking partners. These are 4 structural bets. It leads to 1 outcome, which is how Affirm is going to be the consumer payments network of the next decade and plus some. Let's start with card. You've heard a bunch about how Affirm started as an online checkout button. It was a beautiful button.
A lot of customers used it across a host of different merchant partners, but they came back to us with one singular question that defined this next chapter for us, and that question was, "Where else can I use Affirm?" We listened, we did a bunch of user labs, and then we built this beautiful thing that you see here. This is the new version of Affirm. This is an Affirm that you can take everywhere you go, at the terminal, in your wallet, and you can use it online or in store, and customers have been loving it. Don't just take my word for it. Look at the ways that we have actually taken the structural advantages and combining them into a thing that no one else can replicate. The first is the purchasing power. This is not a static limit.
You don't have to call in for an increase. It actually works for you because it's powered by real-time underwriting that happens on every single swipe. Second is we give you total flexibility. You can either pay now, you can pay later, you can pay now, then decide later. For every single swipe, the choice is the consumer's, not the issuer's. Last, because of our vast merchant network that we have heard a bunch about, we can actually personalize offers, deliver them to your inbox without any caveats, without any fine print, real value delivered. These are the three structural advantages in motion, and it comes alive through the way of the card. No other card in the market does it today, and we feel we have a very good position in terms of how customers are loving it.
Let's look at some numbers. We are seeing the 4.4 million active cardholders are spending $2,400 annually on the card, and that's growing about 130% year-over-year. That's a really tremendous trajectory for where the product is right now. That's not all. When these cardholders take on the card, we see them spend three times more across Affirm than non-cardholders. That translates into $3,900 of total cardholder spend across the network. 16% of these customers are Gen Z. That means that a sizable amount of our population is choosing an Affirm Card over traditional payment methods right from the get-go. This is our highest growing product and it's our most profitable product, and we are just getting started.
If you look at This is one of the most important charts that we obsess about at Affirm. This is a quartile spend on the card. You notice that every single line is stacking on top of each other, which means that we're not just adding more cardholders every quarter, every year. These cardholders found more value in Affirm, so they're using it more because we are giving them more access to merchants, we are giving them a better product, we're giving them more purchasing power. All of that stacks up in more cardholder spend in the network. This is really important because in any product market fit question, you actually look at, is the customer happy? Are they coming back? Are they using it more? Are they spending more? The answer is unanimously yes. All right.
What is our big opportunity ahead of us? Well, we think it's actually very massive. We have a clear path of going from 4.4 million actives into 20 million actives. That is not by paid acquisition. That is not by paid marketing. We are going to serve the customers that are already in our file. You heard Michael and Libor talk about 71 million underwritten, half of them have transacted. Those customers are our future cardholders. Second, we see their spend annually going from $2,400, more than triple, to $7,500 in the longer term because we're gonna give them more features, more value, more products. That 2 stats lead us to believe that we have a clear path to getting to $150 billion annually in terms of total cardholder spend.
Let that sink in for a second, because that is some gigantic number, but we have a clear path to getting there. Let me show you 3 specific ways that are gonna happen soon that get us there. First is that our app and web properties are already shopping destinations. Our app in the U.S. is one of the top shopping apps, and we see that customers come to the app to manage their payments, but they stay to finance their next purchase because they're looking for a better way to pay. They're looking for an offer. What that translates into, Max alluded to it a little bit as well, we have 15 million actives onto our direct-to-consumer properties. Our apps, our web, they see 15 million actives every month, 1 million of which are completely new.
These folks are hearing about us from word of mouth, from their friends, organically, maybe searching for us, and that leads into 4 million checkouts every single month originated from these services. We also have 10,000 merchants offering specific deals, and that number is growing every day. What that means is that our app is already a destination. Our web is already a destination. That destination is a chance to distribute more cards and give more value to customers. When we turn that destination into a moment, amazing things happen. Last fall, we tested and experimented our very first 0% days to see whether we can turn actual demand into something that can scale. It did. It was very popular, and we saw some amazing numbers. We saw 60% more 0% take-up in offers.
We saw 30% incremental GMV without pull forward, what Max was alluding to as well. One of the most interesting stats we saw was that 25% more prime and super prime card acquisitions happened during that time period, those days that we ran those offers. All of that was the network working in concert with each other. Merchant-funded offers, deep customer engagement, take-up, all going round and round in the flywheel, leading up to these amazing numbers. Because the price for good work is more good work is what we say at Affirm, we are going to do it again. We're going to do it in a way that leads up to more offers. We have 70% more offers in the ecosystem. We have 60% more card exclusive offers.
That means that if you're a card member, you get access to these things that you wouldn't otherwise. We are seeing the emails as well as the communication we are sending to customers already being very sticky and very engaged. We couldn't be more excited. Try it for yourself tonight. It starts tonight and it runs for three days. Buy something that you're on the market for. It's 0% APR. It's a very good deal. All right, now for an interlude. Does this scene look familiar? This might actually have been the scene some of you had to bear through while coming to this event. This is the late fees credit card industrial complex doing its job. They lead you to believe that the annual fees that people pay for their credit cards is worth it.
They lead you to believe that credit cards are beloved forms of payments. They lead you to believe that rewards and points is the religion that everyone should find. The reality is actually much starker. This scene is being played out in many airports, in many lounges, which means that you're paying thousands of dollars sometimes to avail of no rewards. You get spreadsheets to model out how much you should be spending on which category to get the right amount of points. You have to do more math to see where you can use those points. Those points have breakage. They have fine print. It is a wild west out there in terms of the credit card industries trying to figure out what a loyalty program should work for the credit card industry, not for the consumer.
We at Affirm, we want to take a sledgehammer to that. We wanted to say, what if we reimagine this from the ground up? First, I'm very proud to announce that in the coming months, we're going to launch a loyalty program for our cardholders to give them two value props that is very much one of our popular hits on the program. One is exclusive offers. We just talked about this. Instead of doing this once a year or twice a year, we're going to have daily offers available to cardholders that is powered by our merchants. This is something that only Affirm can do. When they go into the app, they will see either a 0% or a longer term or something that is customized and personalized to them. The second is they will get more purchasing power.
That's another thing that we hear a lot of time from our customers. As you get the card, you use it, you pay it, you link a bank account, so we can underwrite you with cash flow. You get more purchasing power, something that works for you. Both these features are gonna come to all cardholders for Affirm for a grand price of $0. We believe with this engagement that we drive and the value that we provide, we're gonna see a lot more cardholders being happy and rewards working for them. All right. The last thing. As a product person, one of the key things that gives me satisfaction is building amazing experiences, not just for sake of it, but because better experiences lead to better engagement, lead to happy customers.
I'm very proud to say that in the coming weeks, we're gonna redesign the app from the ground up to give better access to our customers in terms of sign in and sign up. We're gonna revamp the home tab so they can easily navigate the app from the information architecture perspective. Most importantly, we're gonna have a new deals tab where customers can come and find personalized offers just like 0% days and figure out where they can spend their well-earned dollars. That's not all. We're also gonna take the card, and we're gonna redesign it. You might find a memento in your lanyard today. That is the design that we're gonna ship to all new cardholders because we believe that better design leads to better customer engagement, that leads to better outcomes and the flywheel goals.
What I just showed you are 3 important things. More cardholders spending more, happier customers that lead us to feel how this card opportunity can be super big for us. All right. Now that we've talked about card, let's talk about wallets. Wallets are eating commerce right now. This is the biggest shift in payments that we're seeing in 20 years, and our customers are asking us the same question they usually ask, which is, where else can I use Affirm? Can I use it within a wallet? We see these secular trends take shape both for e-com and also in store, and customers are looking for us to provide this value to them instantly where they're shopping. We listened to them, and we got to work. We partnered with the largest wallet providers in the world.
First, we partnered with Google in January 2024 and integrated with Google Pay. Second, we partnered with Apple with their iOS release and integrated into their Apple e-com. Third, we went back to Google again based on popularity and demand and built this amazing Google Autofill feature for Chrome, which is one of the best hidden features that we have. Last but not least, for the last iOS, we introduced the power of Affirm right at the heart of in-store. These are four cornerstone launches that we have done. The customers have been loving it. Let me show you how. First, we are seeing some tremendous volume in the trailing 12 months. $1.7 billion in GMV used by 2.3 million customers. We're seeing 155% year-on-year growth. That's not all.
The biggest thing here is that product-market fit-wise, once these customers use it, 70% more TPUs arise. That means that they're coming back over and over again because wallets are sticky, Affirm is stickier, and the combination of them is explosive. One stat I would want you to leave on this slide. 80% of the volume that I just described is coming from unintegrated merchants. What does that mean? That means that these merchants were previously inaccessible to Affirm, and now through these wallet partners, we're able to actually serve our customers wherever they're shopping, and we're generating incremental volume for Affirm while serving these customers. Okay. No story about wallets would be complete without in-store, which is the final frontier we believe for a company that was born digital native.
We are seeing with our wallet partnerships a 165% year-on-year growth, but more importantly, we are seeing a 4x growth in categories like restaurants and dining and 3x increase in gas and services because customers are choosing us to transact in offline environments in categories of everyday spend. This is a leading indicator for why we believe that with Affirm in these wallets, we are uniquely positioned to win with our structural advantages because we are building and providing better value to these customers. All right. Agentic. A lot of ink has been spilled, as we say, about the future of agentic commerce and how it's gonna take shape and how customers and merchants are going to engage with it.
We at Affirm, instead of taking shape the prediction game, we're trying to actually listen to our customers and anticipate what this is gonna be because we believe that agentic commerce is already upon us. Let me show you a little bit why. Agents are going to take away the drudgery out of shopping. Right now, if you're on a shopping website, you have to go and search for the item, you have to look at the different prices if you choose to, you have to look at reviews, and then you have to pull up a credit card maybe, and then you have to complete the whole process, and then you buy the item.
There's a lot of mechanical things that happen today in terms of shopping. The thing that happens when you remove the drudgery, if you believe that, is that two things get elevated, your affordability as well as access to credit and trust. These two things cannot be disintermediated by an agent. This is a truly human thing that will continue having its place in any shopping environment, we truly believe. If you believe that, Affirm is uniquely situated to win this entire category, because over the last 15 years, we've been building underwriting that is real-time in nature, and we're building affordability components that are easily read and understood by agents. Agents will reward products for their humans which are transparent, which are easy to understand, which are honest. They will punish things that they cannot understand, like compounding fees or late fees or interest.
Those are things that the agents are not going to be looking for when they're recommending options for their customers. The up-funnel messaging that we have built is one of the most popular products because it makes help customers make informed choices. Then purchasing power, which we have talked about, it helps you assess, determine in real-time whether this thing is right for you. What we are doing is operationalizing these structural advantages in 3 different ways. First, we are shaping the standard. We just announced our partnership with Google in the morning, we have signed with Stripe, and we are working with Shopify. 3 important key players in this agentic commerce history.
Second, we're taking what we just described on As-Low-As components and purchasing power and custom making it for the agentic protocols, because unlike the credit card rail that we had to retrofit our first version of Affirm, in this version, when we shape the standard, we can build it native for the agentic journeys. Once we have the first and the second, we're gonna make it ubiquitous. Across the biggest LLMs, like Gemini, and our marquee partners like Priceline, Nectar, and Newegg, and many, many more, we're going to be everywhere where commerce is happening, everywhere where shopping is happening. Let's take a specific example to walk through how this would look like. Take a, take a journey with me. Meet Alyssa. She's a mom. She's a world traveler. She's looking for her next vacation.
She's looking for a vacation to a theme park in the summer, like many of us, but affordability is also very much top of mind for her. She's looking to have this dream vacation, but make sure it fits her budget. She goes to Priceline. She starts her purchasing journey there. She talks to Penny, which is Priceline's agent, and asks, "Where can I find some hotel rooms for my particular budget within walking distance?" Penny goes hard to work, finds some options. Those options are great, but they're a little bit over budget. Penny asks Alyssa if she's open on the dates, and Alyssa wants the same dates because that's what works for her family.
Penny goes hard to work again and suggests Affirm as an option because we are a proud partner of Priceline, and that shows up in a way that is very clear and understandable to Alyssa to purchase these hotel options. These hotel options would probably not have been consummated if Affirm was not an option here. What you saw is that discovery as well as financing happened in the same surface, and Alyssa was able to buy the particular hotels at her price point in a confident way. That's what Affirm does. We turn hesitation into confidence. Second, now Alyssa goes to Gemini to find some headphones for her son because she's looking for a easy way to purchase this, and Google Search is powering the search results here.
At the same time, Affirm is going to be front and center while Alyssa tries to purchase these headphones. Because Alyssa knows Affirm is a honest way to pay, she prefers that, breaks the payments, tries to smoothen the payments to match her cash flow. We are also going to enable Gemini to serve these options in a very easy and transparent way. Now that the trip is booked, headphones are bought, and a few weeks have passed, Alyssa has been paying off her loans. She goes to the Affirm app to make sure that everything is good, everything is paid off. It is. The purchasing power goes up because she's paying her loans back. She's on the lookout for some point-and-shoot cameras, but she's not sure. She doesn't know if it fits her budget.
She goes to the Affirm search, starts a journey on, "I'm looking for point-and-shoot cameras. Are there any deals going on?" This is something very, very specific about Affirm. Because we integrate with a lot of merchants, those merchants can surface deals and offers in a very customized way. In this case, Newegg is running a particular promotion. They can actually target folks like Alyssa in saying, "0% only for you," as a welcome offer, let's say, or a promotional offer, and Alyssa can use that to just buy the camera right from the Affirm app. What did we see? We saw 3 surfaces, same Alyssa, trip booked, headphones bought, cameras bought, all through easy discovery, through easy purchases, and honest financing. That is how Affirm is going to not just play in this space, but go and outright win it.
We're not done yet with agentic. We're working with the major players, and there's more to come. This is just a sneak peek. All the things we just showed you are going to be in production soon in the coming weeks and months, and we couldn't be more excited about it. All right. Now we have looked at card, wallets, and agentic. three surfaces, one through line that Affirm is gonna become the preferred way for customers to pay. There's one last surface that we haven't discussed, which is the banking apps. There are 130 million Americans who use their trusted banking app to conduct their business. These same customers also tell us that financial life is complicated and honestly fragmented. They don't want one more app.
We listened to them, and we thought to ourselves, "What if you could bring the best of Affirm right where the banking is happening?" We did something about it. I'm proud to introduce Affirm Edge, in which now in the known and trusted banking apps,
The same Affirm people trust and love can conveniently be hooked in. You can see your purchasing power, you can access all the offers that we were talking about in terms of specific needs that you might have. It all comes in a way that is very easy for customers to understand and very easier for issuers to integrate with. With that, I'm gonna hand it back to Wayne to talk about how this will look on the issuer side. Thank you.
Okay. We are very excited about Affirm Edge and opportunity to enable banks and credit unions to deliver BNPL to their customers within their products on their surfaces. We often get the question, how big is the potential opportunity here? We think it's pretty big. There's different ways to estimate it, but when we look at the consumers in the U.S. who are debit first, who prefer to use their debit card, and we also look at the % of users who prefer to lead with their mobile banking, that's how they prefer to interact with their bank, and we assume about a $2,000 a year annual incremental spend, we come up with $140 billion annual addressable volume opportunity.
Through our initial partnerships with Fiserv and FIS, we're able to serve a significant portion of the issuers in the market and the cardholders as well. With Affirm Edge, we've been hard at work developing a super strong value proposition for the issuers who partner with us. We've had the opportunity to engage with banks and credit unions of all different shapes and sizes, and these are some of the value drivers that have been resonating. First, it's very attractive for issuers to be able to keep BNPL transactions within their ecosystem to engage their own customers that they've had these long-standing trusted relationships with. Issuers can also earn additional revenue, not only through incremental transactions that they capture, but also through flexible credentials that are available from the leading networks.
Issuers get to take advantage of Affirm's leading BNPL offering, which you've heard a lot about today, and a key part of that is our merchant network and the offers, such as 0% APR, that they fund, and those will be available through Affirm Edge as well. Finally, but by no means least, we're working very hard to make this offering as easy as possible for issuers to integrate and operationalize. We're doing the work so that they don't have to. You don't need to hear it just from me. For our next segment, we're excited, very excited to have the opportunity to hear directly from some of our partners about Affirm Edge. Please welcome Arika Selleck from Fiserv and Phil Lehner from Old National Bank. Okay. Well, Phil-
Absolutely
Erica, thank you so much for joining us. It's really awesome to have you here to talk.
Absolutely
more about this. Maybe if you could both just briefly introduce yourselves, your role, just to give the audience a sense of your perspective on this.
Sure. Phil Lehner. I am President of Consumer Lending at Old National Bank.
Hi. Arika Selleck. I'm the Senior Vice President of Card Strategy at Fiserv.
Great. Maybe Erica, we can start with you. We obviously announced our partnership on this earlier this year. We're very excited to join forces with you. Can you say a few words about why Fiserv pursued this partnership and kind of why you think now is the right time for this type of offering?
For us, it was really about how do we meet consumers where they are today. We know buy now, pay later is now making up something like 6% of U.S. eCom transactions. We want to be able to bring that flexibility into the existing debit card, so we want it to be on their current payment instrument as opposed to having to have a new one. We see an opportunity for debit to not just be sort of a utility as it is today, where you pay for everyday payments. We want it to be something a bit more strategic. The Affirm team really has proven that you can do that with a debit card. That was sort of the reason why we were interested in this now.
Of course, with Affirm, number 1, I just generally love the team. I think you guys have all seen them today. A great team to work with. They also have proven their product works at scale, so that was something we were interested in. Lastly, it was really all about this responsible credit offering. A lot of our banks and credit unions, we have over 3,000 of them that process on our platform, they don't like the idea of bringing buy now, pay later and saying, "We're gonna charge you all these fees," right? We want it to be accessible in a responsible way.
Thank you. Phil, maybe turning to you.
Sure.
You've obviously been in the banking sector for many years. You've seen the development of this whole BNPL thing. Be interested in your perspective on how have you seen the growth of that product and kind of what kind of adoption you've seen in your customer base?
Our customers are using it, plain and simple. Last year we did over $60 million in transactions through buy now, pay later. Currently today, we have 40,000 customers that have an active pay plan with buy now, pay later. Our customers are already using it, for us it's how do we get into that transaction so that customers are thinking they're doing that transaction with us at Old National Bank and thinking about us first.
That makes sense. Obviously we and Fiserv came to you with this.
Yeah
idea. Is there something about this offering that's attracted you?
Yeah. It's simple, I think. We've talked about this for a while now at Old National, is this something we can do on our own and build on our own? It would be quite a lift to be able to do on our own. Partnering with somebody like Affirm, who's been in the space a long time. You had mentioned in your introduction about the merchant network that you have. That's not something we'd be able to replicate in any time, if ever. It makes perfect sense to partner with Affirm. With Fiserv, we've been working together for a very long time, partners, not a customer vendor type of relationship. We really think about each other as partners. When they came to us with this offering, it's a no-brainer.
It makes perfect sense for us.
How about you, Erica? You've obviously talked to a number of issuer partners in addition to ONB. Like, what kind of feedback have you received about this idea?
Yeah, I would say it's pretty consistent to what Phil just said. We looked at our overall transaction base. We process 25 billion transactions a year on this debit processing platform that we're talking about here. Buy now, pay later transactions make up about 1%, and that's card present, card not present. It's something that we're seeing widescale adoption, and the banks and credit unions want to participate, but of course they want to have it in their own ecosystem. For them, you know, this is a no-brainer solution, particularly on debit. You see a lot of this on credit, but less so on the debit side. Lots of demand. I think folks really like that we are doing the heavy lifting.
As Fiserv, we have not only the integrations with Affirm, and we call it the auth stream, we have worked with Visa and Mastercard. We also have the mobile front end with all the digital providers, so we can bring to life the solution that you guys saw in the video pretty rapidly. They don't have to do much, as well as the credit underwriting and servicing will be done by Affirm.
Erica, I think you've been pretty enthusiastic that once we're out of the gate, we can have pretty widespread and potentially rapid issuer adoption. Like, what do you see as kind of underpinning that potential?
Yeah, I think a couple things for us. The first is just I mentioned the scale, right? We have no shortage of issuers, over 3,000 that process directly on us. Many of those use our mobile front end, 25 billion transactions a year, so the scale is there. The Affirm Card's also shown us one of the biggest things that we wanted to do this year, and a lot of what you'll see coming from my table is, how do we make debit more of an engagement tool versus just a utility? You guys really proved, you know, part of the business case we had to work on together was, how do you make a debit card, you know, how do we drive higher transactions? How do we drive more spend and usage and deepen that engagement?
That was really the core of why we think this is going to be successful.
Phil, do you have a view on, you know, if you add this to your portfolio and you have BNPL and debit, how it might change the role of debit kind of in your product lineup?
I think it moves from just transactional to strategic. Customers are not only gonna use debit card for those short, everyday basic purchases, but think about the longer term purchases or the more strategic pre-planned purchases. We firm believers that we're gonna get many more swipes with our debit card, and it gives it the flexibility to truly be top of wallet. You don't have to wonder if you need to pull out a credit card or a debit card. This one card can do it all.
If you think about it alongside your credit card offering, do you worry at all about cannibalization? Like, how do you see those two products coexisting?
Not at all. As president of consumer lending, I get asked that question a lot internally at the bank, "Are you worried about that?" No, we want our customers to transact with Old National Bank. That's debit card, credit card, traditional lending products. It doesn't really matter. This really just gives our customers more options. The younger demographics as well, like, seem to be debit card first users compared to previous generations that used credit cards more often. This is just a perfect option for us to put into our offerings.
Right. Maybe final question for each of you. You know, if you look ahead a couple of years, what does success look like here for this product, this offering, if you think about, you know, for your own businesses and then for the consumer ultimately?
Want me to go first?
Sure. Again, top of wallet. Our debit card is top of wallet. Customers could use our cards for everyday transactions and those pre-planned transactions. Everything is integrated into our mobile app, into our ecosystem. Customers don't need to worry about going to a third party or a different app to do their transactions or which card they're gonna pull out. For us, success in a couple years is customers thanking Old National Bank for all of their transactions with the one debit card.
For us, it would be obviously widescale adoption. We'd love for Phil Lehner and all of our issuers to participate. We've got over $200 million cardholders in the U.S. that work off of or have cards on Fiserv process platform, so that would be a huge win. Debit on BNPL, just generally as a standard payment forum would be amazing here. Really thinking about debit as a more strategic instrument than, rather than just the utility which I described. Of course, responsible lending. I think that's one of the nice things. We see this really as a cash flow management tool rather than another form of credit, so that's something we think is really valuable for our issuers.
Okay.
Awesome.
We'll leave it there. Thank you so much for coming.
Thank you, Mike. Appreciate it.
Thank you.
All right.
Thanks for having us.
Thank you.
Slight change of stage here. I'd like to say thank you again to Jim and Erica for participating in our fireside chat. We really appreciate their time. Okay, for the next section, we're gonna give an update on our international expansion initiatives. To do that, I would like to introduce on the stage Pat Suh, who's our Senior Vice President of Revenue. Pat?
Thank you, Zane. Always glad to be the final act before the main event. In any case, my name is Pat Suh. I'm the Senior Vice President of Revenue at Affirm. I'm so excited to speak to you today about our international expansion, our progress, and the opportunities that lie ahead. You just heard from Wayne and Vishal, they talked about the opportunities we have to land, to deepen and expand within North America. Beyond that, there's still a significant amount of opportunity. In fact, more than $5 trillion of e-commerce and travel spend occurs outside of North America. Shortly after our last investor forum, Shopify came to us and said, "We have a problem. International is our largest growth vector, the markets are very fragmented.
In every country, there are multiple local providers, disjointed customer experiences, and subpar underwriting and technology. They wanted a single trusted partner that could simplify the complexity and deliver a better experience globally. That conversation was not unique to Shopify. In fact, we heard the same thing from many of our largest partners and merchants. 72% of our top merchants actually operate globally. You see, we have the opportunity, we have the demand, in February 2025, we announced our exclusive partnership with Shopify to launch in Australia, Germany, France, and the Netherlands. That, along with the EU, opens up over $1.7 trillion of addressable TAM. Why are we well-positioned to expand internationally? Well, first, we have the technology. We have the best underwriting in the industry. We have a proprietary risk infrastructure.
You heard about the 14 years of investment in our risk models, as well as the transaction data. This gives us a significant head start into any market that we enter. We're able to localize our proven infrastructure and adapt quickly with the local signals that we have. Next, we have just the global scale. There is no provider that provides such global scale and consistency the way we have. No one else works with the largest retailer, e-commerce retailer in the world. Over the last decade, we've built systems that are designed for that reliability, consistency, and the operational rigor necessary to operate on international scale. Most importantly, I wanna talk about the customer value proposition. Of course, transparent financing with no hidden fees really resonates across markets. I think that's sort of a universal.
In many international markets, there's not a lot of flexibility or a lot of financing options, to be honest. You see, especially in the U.K. and Australia, pay in 3, pay in 4 dominates. What we've done is we've actually made all the necessary investments technologically. We got the regulatory relationships in order to be able to offer longer term options, to be able to offer monthly payments, and really be able to offer a full suite of financing offerings for our merchants across the board. When you see that, all of this helps drive higher conversion, larger basket sizes, and better merchant outcomes. How have we proven all this? Well, we started in Canada, and I wanna talk about our progress in Canada.
We've been in market for several years, and you can see we've launched and signed a number of merchants, both in the U.S. and expanded, as well as local partners there. Now, I wanna draw your attention to the slide on the left. You can see that in April 2025, we launched with Shopify, and you can see the pace really accelerated. In fact, we saw 7x growth of our merchant count to 26,000 merchants in 12 months. Very exciting growth. What we learned was that launching with a distribution partner can really accelerate that growth and de-risk your entry into certain markets. As you can see, with this rapid scaling, we've also signed on a set of additional distribution partners to continue to grow within Canada.
We took those learnings, we took it to the U.K., and in September of 2025, we actually launched much earlier with Shopify. Again, you see the rapid growth. 10,000 active merchants, 260,000 users in only a couple quarters. Again, distribution scale, this gives us tremendous amount of local momentum to address the $230 billion of TAM in the U.K. We've already signed a number of select U.K. commitments and many more to come that we'll be announcing over the next several months. We have a consistent, repeatable playbook. We land scale fast with existing partners. We also expand growing merchant adoption, both locally and with the merchants that we have in place. I'm especially excited about this idea of deepening.
All the products that you saw between the card and the marketplace, as we continue to grow our consumer network and continue to grow our merchant network, those two flywheels also help in enabling that growth. We can introduce these products and market in the same way we have in the U.S., deepening and strengthening our penetration within these countries. Tying everything together, we have three major work streams. One is obviously launching with Shopify in Australia, Netherlands, Germany, France. We continue to expand our global partnerships, as well as signing new merchant partnerships within the regions. We continue to make investments on that structurally advantaged platform. The platform from a technology perspective, our regulatory relationships in order to be able to be compliant in market, and then obviously our consumer benefits and our consumer products that we can introduce over time.
All this just builds on the flywheel and the structural advantages that we've talked about all day today. Now to close, I wanted to just talk a little bit more about the Shopify and Affirm partnership, and I know we've talked about it at good length here. I think it's really important to underscore how much this partnership really drives growth for both parties. I mean, it is true competitive advantage in terms of distribution when we launch in any in any market. It de-risks us as we enter those markets. It also de-risks the partner as well, that they can go with a proven partner like us. To date, we've done over $20 billion in overall GMV, and there's still much more opportunity to come.
To close, I wanted to leave you with the perspective from Shopify with Harley Finkelstein, Shopify's President.
Hello, everyone. My name is Harley Finkelstein. I'm the president of Shopify. I know of course today is Affirm's Investor Forum. I thought I'd jump on here and share some of my thoughts on what's been an incredible partnership between Shopify and Affirm, and also to tell you how much opportunity we see ahead. Affirm supports us with one of our most important products and one of the most important parts of Shopify, which is called Shop Pay. Shop Pay has now been used by over 200 million consumers all over the world, and unofficially, I think it is the world's favorite checkout. I'm really proud of that, and it is critical for me that it stays that way, and that is why I think Affirm is such an important partner to us here at Shopify and to me personally.
Through this partnership, the world's favorite checkout now offers the world's best buy now, pay later product with Shop Pay Installments, which is of course powered by Affirm. We launched this partnership together in 2021, and to date, we've facilitated over $20 billion in purchases together. It's been a huge success, especially in the U.S., and now we are rolling this out to more places globally, which is really exciting. We've already expanded to Canada and the U.K., and now we're rolling out to new markets like Australia, Germany, France, and the Netherlands. We think the opportunity for us to keep working together just keeps growing.
Around half of Shopify's merchants are based outside of the U.S., so this partnership to expand has so much potential to merchants all over the world, and offering them fair and very transparent credit, and also helping our merchants grow their business, which is the business that we are in at Shopify. I just want to say thank you to Max and the entire team at Affirm. It's been an incredible partnership. Often in technology, you don't see a lot of companies that work together that are so aligned from an ambition perspective, from a mission perspective, but also from a technical chops perspective. We are wonderful partners, and we think the world of the folks over at Affirm. Excited for what we're building ahead. Enjoy the rest of your day.
To Max and the Affirm team, congrats, and let's keep going. See ya.
Okay. We appreciate the kind words from Harley. We're now gonna begin our first question and answer session. I'm going to invite back up on stage several of our Affirm speakers that have spoken already. We ask that you not ask any financial questions yet because we haven't given the financial update yet. I know it's hard to resist, you'll just have to wait until the final Q&A session. We're gonna bring the chairs up here. You'll have six of our management team members, and I'll moderate. In terms of the rules of the road Oops, sorry. Don't wanna spoil that part. Rules of the road. For those of you in person, we are gonna be walking around with two microphones. Maggie, if you don't mind getting one, and I guess Helen too.
Megan, we'll have two microphones if you wanna ask a in-person question. If you're watching this virtually, we ask that you email us at ir@affirm.com. We'll try to mix in questions from both here in the audience as well as online. Again, just to reiterate, please do not ask financial questions. We're not gonna be able to answer them yet because we haven't given an update to the medium-term framework. We also ask when you ask the question, please indicate both your name as well as the company that you represent. That's important for our transcript purposes. Okay, I think we're ready for our management team members. Okay. Wherever you'd like. Let's see. I'll just get this one over here. I'll sit over here.
I thought we were taking assigned seats.
Do we need another one? Here, here, you take this one.
You do something. We gotta mix up the focus.
Need one more. One more, please. Yeah. Let's go. Does anyone want to be the brave person that goes first?
James.
James Faucette.
Thank you very much. James Faucette, Morgan Stanley. Appreciate all the details today. One thing that I've kind of always left, has always left me scratching my head a little bit, and you mentioned a couple of different points, and this is this idea, particularly that as you've tied it to the card, the purchasing power concept. Just wondering if you can talk through a little bit how the purchasing power is arrived at, particularly as you're trying to do transaction-based underwriting. Would love to hear, as people become aware of their purchasing power, especially with the card, how that changes behavior. Thanks.
Well, I mean, I think the, you know, the, a lot of the, obviously people, have a tendency to compare it to limits, right? The card limits. One of the things that we want to be able to communicate to consumers and be able to do it clearly, and consistently is in the moment, how much purchasing power do you have left? That can change based on obviously what kind of purchases you've made in the past. Not only are we actually now underwriting at every transaction as a part of the transaction, we're actually doing the same as soon as the transaction is completed to understand what the individual's purchasing power is going forward.
It changes, you know, based on things like duration, right? Shorter loans, larger you know, larger monthly payments, have an impact on purchasing power. Obviously, things like repayment or lack thereof, have impact on purchasing power. It is a mechanism for us to be able to communicate with the consumer about, in the moment, what is their purchasing power, based on the facts set at a given time.
Ramsey, let's go. Oh, sorry.
Hi, Ramsey El-Assal from Cantor. Thanks for taking my question. I had a question about underwriting in an agentic commerce context. It seems like agentic credit, including buy now, pay later, is a little bit of a different paradigm where the bot, in some circumstances, might make the purchase decision, but then the owner of the bot is stuck with the payback sort of, you know, obligation. Hopefully those two things are in sync. I guess my question is, in terms of underwriting there, do you see a different you know, is your historical data and your models, how do you prepare to underwrite that?
You know, can you leverage the data that you have now, or is there gonna be sort of an air pocket for the industry where you're trying to season models with new classes of data, basically?
I mean, it's, it doesn't exist, so we don't have data on it. I mean, we do think that it will actually result in more data, richer data. The initial work we're doing with Stripe, with Shopify, with Google, and including our own first-party CLI for agents to use and interact with us, we are speccing out and creating a richer set of data that the agent is bringing with it in order to interact with Affirm as a part of the underwriting process, as well as the post-purchase process, right? Like, as you see these purchases showing up, they are going to be distinct from, obviously, purchases that you are making without the help of an agent. We want people to understand, "Hey, this is happening on your behalf.
Hey, did you know about this? When they go to repay, you know, this is a repayment for a purchase that your agent made. A lot of the information that we're going to be using in our underwriting of agentic transactions is also they're doing double duty to help the customer understand what is going on in the moment as well as after the purchase has been made, so that there's no confusion, there's no issues, and so that the customer support process becomes richer. All of it, as it happens today, all that information gets folded back into underwriting. We're pretty excited about it. Anything where we've looked at, where we're getting more data through a channel, when a merchant integrates and starts providing us more data, that leads to better outcomes, better decisioning.
Anything that can provide us more data is, for us, you know, is great. You know, we already think of the product, the flow, this idea of every transaction is an engagement. You know, it's that product flow is a data magnet. Agentic is only gonna accelerate that. We expect significantly better underwriting as a result.
Try to get a little geographic diversity in here. Jason, you wanna?
Jason Kupferberg from Wells Fargo. My question is for Max. Max, of everything you've shared so far today, what are you most excited about over the next decade? My guess would be at the last Investor Day, it would've been Card. It was very nascent at the time. Where do you stand today?
Michael likes to claim that I'm from the future.
Fact.
Don't hold, you know, my feet to the fire on this 1 too soon, but the honest answer is the stuff that I'm most excited about I can't share yet. I know Michael is about to hit me somehow from remote, but part of the awesomeness of having an executive team like this, which I hope all of you got a good sense for who they are and how good they are, is I actually get to go off into a cave and build stuff that will be the next Card or the next something that I'll be excited to announce sometime from now, and 3 years from that point we'll be gushing how great of a product it is. For every 1 of those things, 15 die on the shop room floor because they're not good enough.
That is the non-answer. Of the things that we covered today, I think we're dangerously close to making Affirm Edge a reality, which I think is just a force multiplier to this whole idea of who we are and how we do business and what do we deliver to our consumers, so it's very hard not to be super excited about it. I'm generally very excited about AI, anything touching AI, with AI in it, baked in AI, with AI as a side dish is great. These guys know that one too well. Those are probably the two sort of, like, front and center. My personal excitement about being at Affirm, leading Affirm, has monotonically improved over the last 15 years, for sure, if sampled quarterly.
The function has a distinctively exponential bent to it over the last, call it 3 or 4 quarters. There's just a lot of really cool stuff happening. Because of agentic, in particular code, coding tools, it's a lot easier to find out if some of these ideas are good or bad. It's a, it's almost a silly question. We'll find out if all the things that I'm excited about are, you know, which ones are gonna work.
We actually did receive a question online that I thought was pretty interesting. James Spurling from Shea Capital asks: Can you expand on Affirm's potential or future appetite to participate in merchant partner or marketing automation, whether that be off the Affirm app, in the Affirm app, somehow leveraging the data assets that Affirm has on consumers? He also asks a somewhat related question, "Do you think that might bring us into competition with our own merchants?
I think there I'll start. This is definitely a Vishal, Libor, Wayne, Pat, it touches a lot of. Well, just as you sort of analyze. There, there are two questions in that question. Question number one is, do we have a product to sell or a value to offer to merchants beyond payment acceptance? The answer is obviously yes. We are a marketing surface, as you saw in our app. We are a co-marketer with them on their own surfaces. There, there's many things we do with merchants today that precedes the actual sale to help them get the qualified buyer in the door.
You know, not to sort of unveil too much on the future roadmap, but we do have a bunch of things in mind of how might we help them do a better job marketing to their consumers, to their would-be consumers on our own services or elsewhere, just because we understand the buyer so much better. Like, one of the things that I used to drop, I think I may have actually said this, I don't know if I said it in the last one of these events, but I've said it before, so it's not a big secret.
The conversion end-to-end from a search in the Affirm app to the actual purchase hangs out in the 25%, which is, like, first time you think like, "Oh my God, like, so Google is like 0.0025, and you guys are a couple orders of magnitude better. That's insane." It's not that insane. People come to our app because they know what they wanna buy, and we're there to provide credit. It's still kind of a, on the surface of it is a great number. Bringing some of that goodness, which is obviously accomplished through machine learning, to our partners in other endeavors of theirs, e.g. marketing, is a great idea. We're working on things like that and more, more to come.
On the other side of the question is the, isn't that naturally gonna lead you down the route of, okay, you have 5 merchants selling jeans. You should pit them against each other, if somebody's searching for, I don't know, AG, a jean brand, maybe we should be selling them Levi's instead. The short answer is that's not the business we're in. Part of why we can serve competing merchants, like very competitive merchants, in fact, in the same app with the same product, is because we're very good at not pitting our merchants against each other. The business we're in is providing honest financial products. That's what the people who come to our app are there to do.
There's not a world in which we say, "Cool Merchant A, we wanna power your sales, but Merchant B is paying us too much money to help you. We're gonna take some of your marketing dollars and route it to the other guys." It just wouldn't work in our app, it wouldn't work in other surfaces. That's not the plan. I think we've been consistent with that message and consistent with that reality enough where merchants trust us, and we wouldn't wanna do anything to break that trust. There's not a competition with our merchants. There's definitely competition among our merchants, and we're there to make sure everyone does their very best for our shared consumers.
This side. Andrew, you wanna take the next one?
This is, uh-
Sorry, go ahead.
Andrew Bauch from BMO Capital Markets. There was one slide you had at, where you kinda outlined the top 250 enterprise partners that you're not working with today on an integrated basis, and then the volume that's coming from D2C, you know, quite outpacing the rest of the growth in the business. Maybe you could walk us through a little bit further how you kinda see the penetration within that base get unlocked from, you know, using the card on a regular basis when they're not integrated, and how that kind of evolves from a penetration perspective.
Do you wanna take the D2C part?
Sure. I mean, look, the beauty of building these products in this industry is that the customers love the product so much, there's an emotional factor to it. They come and tell us all the things they want. Like, there's not a mystery. When we talk to them, they're telling us how much they love it. The same love takes us down that route of Affirm is not integrated on that particular merchant, how else can I use Affirm? That's where the card comes into play. One even above that, there is this fact that we are able to provide them better purchasing power and offers that they wouldn't get on any other way that they're paying for it. That's why the love exists, because we can give them a product that doesn't exist in the market so far.
That is what we are seeing both from wallets that I showed in the, in the slides as well, as well as in the card. 80% of the wallet volume is coming from unintegrated merchants for that particular reason. We see that penetration just going higher because as people are using those products in those services, they're actually coming back on a, on a higher repeat usage, which I also showed. We see that there's a clear path. You find a way to use Affirm at those merchants. You use it, then you use it more, and the flywheel goes round and round because we can better underwrite you, et cetera. We see a clear path of getting there.
I'll just tack on. We're obviously delighted to be able to serve the consumers on those unintegrated merchants. Make no mistake, we would love to have the merchant integrations as well. The D2C volume that we do is an exceptional proof point when we're speaking to those merchants to say, "Did you know in the past year, this many customers transacted, this many were repeats, this was the volume, this was the average order value. Here's what we think we could do based on all our prior experience if we were to integrate with you." It's often a great, lead move to have that D2C volume when we think about the integration path.
Yeah. Oh, sorry, Pat. Go ahead.
I was just gonna say that even though that D2C volume is quite substantial, when we're integrated, it's a multiple of that. If you think about the kind of friction even going through an app, someone gets there, has to put that card information into the site. Just imagine the multiplicative effect of being on site.
Yeah, then that we've found is usually due to different consumer populations. Different people think about how they're going to pay for something at different points in the journey. Obviously card users have the card, that's how they're thinking about making that payment. Other consumers think about it only, you know, when they're at the bottom of checkout and selecting a payment method. What we see is when we do the direct integration, as Pat said, it's multiplicative. We have enough of those proof points now to be able to show people the math and talk to merchants about it and stand behind that when they do.
Dan, I see you way in the corner of the room, got your hand up high there.
Hey guys, Max, question for you. You mentioned in the beginning a specific merchant that caused a lot of issues. You want me to ask the other question? What would you say would be the tangible benefits for that merchant specifically or any merchant, if they actually come back to Affirm? I think it's very relevant, you know, given your underwriting. It's Dan Dolev from Mizuho, by the way.
We're hypothesizing. I think from the volume perspective, you know, brings right back to the previous question, the previous answer. It is a multiplicative effect. We would absolutely see more volume. That merchant would absolutely see more volume, full stop. The slightly deeper answer, part of the value we bring to the consumer is affordability and incremental access to credit that is safe. Our structure as a lender, no late fees, no compounding, no deferred, all of that isn't just like a great thing for the consumer. It's also a truth teller for us as an underwriter. We screw up, we lose money. We don't get to say like, "Well, you're late, so we'll make some money on your late fees." Like, it's like, "Ooh, we made a mistake.
We're not going to make money on this loan at all or it might take too long." The fact that we keep ourselves honest structurally and always have, is a proof point or it's a vector that we are constantly being propelled forward with by asking, "Hey, we need more data." We need some way of underwriting these people because they're coming to us for affordability. Anytime we're integrated, it just naturally feeds the model that allows us to say yes more often. Also with deals that are actually specific, not just to the consumer, but to the merchant and the merchandise. A loss of a merchant, which doesn't happen to us very frequently at all, I'm happy to say, means that we get less SKU level data. We get it in some ways that are, you know, more than compensate for the credit losses.
The incremental approvals would immediately go up. You would see better sign-up rates because people would find out that we exist in the moment of saying, "Hmm, I'm not sure I want to put this on my debit card, and here's Affirm. I've heard of it." The answer I'm trying to drive to, which may or may not be useful to your question, is actually something that Wayne just said. We love the idea that card reaches everywhere. We love the idea that we get to ride the long tail of merchants. We will never get to some remote village in Thailand and hang the Affirm logo. Maybe we will one day. I don't wanna short the option.
It'll take a while before we get to really remote locations and hang our logo on a door, but we don't have to. The card will work there. I use the card internationally all the time. It's quite amazing. Every time we add another merchant, we are pushing the flywheel forward. We will never get out of the business of showing up to merchants and saying, "Hey, so about that integration, either former or never, we do want our logo here. We want the Good Housekeeping stamp of approval. Affirm works here and works here well, and this is a path for you to offer your own 0% days any day of the week you like. You want to do a sale, great.
Flip a switch, it'll show up at your checkout, completely unbeholden to anybody else's calendar." There's a lot of benefits to being integrated, and we're constantly telling merchants, "We think you're missing out." There are hundreds of millions of dollars of volume, billions of dollars of volume, perhaps sometimes in some merchants, that should already be integrated. By the way, the data quality of that channel does a lot, not just for us, but also for the merchant. They get to see every quarter a very deep, deep cut into what's happening to these consumers. What are they buying? What are they paying back? What else might they be buying, et cetera. It's definitely, it's a thing we want.
I was bragging about the consumer side of the retention, not even a little bit suggesting that we don't care so much anymore. We care very much.
Adam Frisch from Evercore.
These are, like, almost ruined.
Thanks. Adam Frisch from Evercore. Max, a question for you on strategy. You guys laid out a really good supporting case for why you're growing and all the different levers within buy now, pay later, no doubt. But my question is, going forward, do you see yourself several years from now still being single thread buy now, pay later, or do you envision Affirm becoming a more diversified flywheel? You know, Chime and Cash App, for example, are showing some really good adoption for different products. Not to say one's right or wrong, but do you see yourself going that way at some point in the future where you're more than just buy now, pay later? Thanks.
I love the question. Buy now, pay later is not a product. This is something that I would love for the world to fully grasp. It is an observation or a strategic shift in the way people consume financial products. Like, it has a weird name, and I don't like the acronym, and I've tried many times to convince people, "Don't call us that." You know, we can call it something. People seem to call it buy now, pay later. But what it means to us is financial products, and specifically a way to consume financial products. No fine print, no gotchas, no gimmicks, a way to differentiate from prior players. In that sense, we're going to continue down the road that we have chosen for ourselves, building these honest financial products.
Even if you focused on the P, that is to say pay part of buy now, pay later, there's still a lot more road to travel there than just the one thing that we're famous for. Absolutely, we'll build lots of financial products, and they will all be in this vein of buy now, pay later insofar as the strategic shift of consumption is concerned. The specifics of the products are not for me to announce right now, but no, we're not going to be a single, you know, pay in 6, 12, and 18. When we launched, we were pay in 30 days, and that was the only product we had.
We've since expanded into, I don't know, 40 different financing programs that we offer at the point of sale, and we have a bunch of other stuff, and we have Edge, and we have Agentic, which has some wrinkles to it. Yet it's all kind of we think of it as the way to do financial services for consumers. By the way, we're also more than dabbling in financial services for businesses now too. There's the partnership with Intuit is a good exhibit A in that story. Hopefully I can impose the buy now, pay later is not just one product. It's a collection of products.
Next.
Thanks very much.
That way.
This is Nate Svensson from Deutsche Bank. I wanted to ask about some of the initiatives to drive share of cart. I think you had the stat on every basis point's 120 billion of GMV. Wondering specifically, I think that was focused on enterprise. I'm wondering about the long tail of merchants, some of those qualitative initiatives you talked about, BoostAI, embedded checkout, Connected Accounts. Wondering if the same initiatives are gonna apply to the long tail merchant. You also showed the penetration in terms of share of cart getting up to 2.7% of the share of cart. Is that kinda like the right run rate to think about going forward, or do you think these initiatives can kind of change the direction of that curve and flip positively going forward?
I'll start by clarifying. The $120 million figure is on the total merchant portfolio. The one chart I showed that went up to 2.9% was U.S. enterprise, but the $120 million figure was the total portfolio. There's a whole toolkit of things which I didn't bother going over in great detail, but there's like a dozen or more levers that when we launch with a merchant, we're rolling out, you know, up-funnel messaging to make sure that that's really clear, so the customer knows about their purchasing power. We're talking to the merchants about initiatives like 0% APR, and then onto the things that I described like Boost AI, Connected Accounts, embedded checkout.
I think as a broad statement, wherever we can, we take the things that are working and roll them out as far as we can through the merchant base. It's very common for us to innovate with a big partner, discover something that works, and then say, "Hey, this, we know the results now. This makes sense. Let's roll it out as widely as we can." There are certain things where it really only makes sense for an enterprise partner to do because of the ins and outs of it, shall we say. Where we can, we roll it out as widely as possible. As we develop these initiatives, we spread them out.
I mean, just a little bit more color. Like BoostAI and AdaptAI, both of those came out of work we were doing manually with the very largest enterprises of tuning those programs for them. AI made it possible for us to, you know, with, you know, relatively straightforward ability to take all those optimizations that took a ton of analysts to do for the largest merchants and say like, "Okay, now do it for any merchant of any size." yeah, we expect those kinds of those specific products as well as products like that to have outsized impact, on, you know, outside of enterprise, relative to enterprise.
Just to answer the point about the long tail, we do offer different pricing programs that have different levels of conversion. For our specific long tail merchants, we have over 3 programs just to simplify it. A base program and then increasingly more premium products that introduce more 0% and increase conversion. The merchant is paying a little bit more for better conversion ultimately, which is a combination of all of the tools we have. Shopify, in fact, has 2 programs. They simplify it even more. One just introduces a lot more 0%, longer term 0%, up to 12 months. From a long tail scale perspective, just offering a simplified set of programs really allows merchants to choose and opt in to more aggressive programs.
Darrin, you wanna go next?
Thanks, guys. It's Darrin Peller from Wolfe Research. Can you just touch on the steps, you think you need to take, and perhaps the timing expected to improve the levels of engagement you talked about on the card? I think you quoted the 2.5 or 2.4 thousand going to over 7,000. You talked about the loyalty program on card expanded offers. Is that merchant-funded? I actually just had one quick one on the international side. When you talked about all the growth you saw in the different markets, is the consumer profile similar enough or, you know, in some ways, do you expect a similar trajectory in each of these markets, given that credit and adoption of credit in those markets have often differed? Thanks again, guys.
We can start with the card one. The trend line that we're seeing, and this is over a longer term period, is that you saw the cohort I spent. It stacks on top of each other. That stacking is happening organically in many ways. We haven't actually gone and done a lot of product features that specifically increase that spending that is happening with those cardholders. What we are seeing, though, is that once they start using it, their engagement to the app increases, and all the things that we've been discussing on how that engagement leads to better conversion and better outcomes, that is rising to the up and right.
To answer your question, the loyalty program that we are devising is actually coming from both the consumer side, but also on the merchant side, because it's a top destination.
For merchants to actually go and show this value prop right in front of a captive audience and have them use the offer, just like you saw in the agentic context as well. If there's a special SKU that is being subsidized by a particular merchant, that can drive conversion while maintaining price integrity. It's a huge conversion lever. It is like a marketing effort in many ways, and they're using those dollars to actually fund these offers. What we wanna do is to offer this to the entirety of the cardholder population and show them this is a specific exclusive thing that you can only get with Affirm. That's something that is, like, very near and dear to us.
Our merchant network, our real-time underwriting, then being able to match those consumers to those merchants, all of those are possible now because we have this highly engaged surface, both on the app and the web. That is how we see more users coming in, so the visitors are going up and to the right. They're taking on more cards. They're using the card more. Once we start building features, including the redesign I showed you, we just see a step function change in many of those behaviors, and we make it easier for customers to discover and then use the card in all of these different places. Yeah, that's the path that we see to more than triple the current spend on the card.
To answer the international piece, we do see a lot of demand, as I mentioned a bit, about longer term products. In many markets, it's only pay in 3, pay in 4. What we find is that people haven't put in the level of effort that is needed to meet some of the regulatory requirements in some of those regions. So we are making that investment, and we've made those investments for a long time. We are really, Max joked about legal teams and how he dives deep, but that's because we are very conscious of all the regulations and work very closely with regulatory bodies in every region. Definitely see demand in countries that pay in 3, pay in 4 dominate.
As we think about places like Germany that have different sort of set of financial products, we certainly will test in market. We will work with partners that have been in market to make sure we have the right financial products and offerings. The fact that we can offer a breadth of different financing options really opens up the opportunity for us.
We'll take one last question, and then we'll need to move-
There'll be one more Q&A, don't worry.
There will be a final Q&A session, so please keep your ideas.
Hi, Rayna Kumar from Oppenheimer. You make a very strong case for agentic commerce. Do you think there will be a stronger economics for you in an agentic commerce transaction versus a normal e-commerce transaction over time? Separately, to move forward in agentic commerce, do you think you need a stablecoin strategy?
Michael likes to warn people not to ask me the meaning of life question as the last question in every investor meeting. This is dangerously close to it. The short answer on the latter half, I don't think so. We will have things to say about stablecoins, but as a bunch of technologists and honestly nerds, we love new toys, especially if they're shiny, and stablecoins are sure very shiny right now. We try very hard to put them through the wringer of, do we need this? Do we have value to offer to the ecosystem? Just because this tool is available, we shouldn't play with it. We shouldn't, you know, launch things to launch things. We'll have something to say on the stablecoin front. No, I don't think agentic commerce specifically is a make or break with stablecoins.
In part, I think the proof point there is very simple. We are directly integrated with half a million points of sale. We're rapidly increasing that. That's another form of presentment and settlement. Stablecoin is a really clever way of settling very cheaply. We have a proprietary rail in which we settle just fine. Anyway, that's a long conversation. We'll perhaps get to it maybe before the next one of these events happens. On the margin side of agentic, I'm sort of a perma-optimist, and so I think we'll make more money in that world, in part because I think discovery will become a much more human affair while the mechanics of checkout will become much more automated.
I think the reality of agentic shopping isn't gonna be as simple as, you know, buy me a pair of pants and, you know, they just show up. I think it's going to be much more, "Well, I want the green kind with stripes. Now go find me the ones that fit and make sure they ship." You know, all the sort of downstream execution will be handled by AI. The taste dependent part will probably remain human for a very long time. Even after AI really knows what kind of green pants I like, I'm still gonna wanna verify that it, you know, keeps to my current set of tastes. Deciding on a financial product, the mechanics of how to settle is going to be automated.
The part where you decide, "Ooh, I love the fact that I'm paying no interest on this thing at all." will still be a taste moment. Until now, you could still be fooled by the fact that a 0% with an asterisk from one of our competitors versus our 0%, which has no asterisk and never have and never will. If you're in a hurry, the two compare similarly, like, "Oh, sure, I'll take the first one I saw." Agentic will not allow you to make that mistake. It'll say, "Wait a second. like, that 0, that's not a real 0.
Like, that's literally designed to make it not be zero. With a natural shift of preference with AI driving it, we will just have more leverage in the ecosystem as say, like, we will help you convert people that are conscious of the true cost of credit, and that will go from finance nerds like us to everyone because AI is there to monitor. I feel like that particular wind is very strongly into our backs. That said, there's not a whole lot of agentic transactions happening right now, so what do we really know? The signs are pointing in this direction just from the sheer enthusiasm of the partners we work with.
Yeah, maybe another way to sort of say the same thing is that, you know, in an agentic world which is rational, more of the promotional budgets will gravitate towards rational decision-making, rational incentives, like, you know, like credit, like terms, like offers. We believe that that will accrete to us in an agentic world. We're pretty excited.
Okay, great. Thank you. We'll see you all again in about 15 minutes. Back to the green room. Give us just a minute here to change the stage, please.
Go ahead.
We should-
off the stage?
Oh, yeah, we're about to start again. Sorry. I think people are Hey, I know. Yeah. Contrary to popular opinion, this is actually not a break. Sorry. I don't know where everybody got that idea. Next we'd like to talk about our funding and financial outlook. I know this is what has brought many of you here today, is to get the updated medium-term financial framework. For that, I'd like to introduce Rob O'Hare. Yeah. Thank you. All right. I know I'm keeping everyone from snacks, and it's been a long day. Hi, everyone. Good afternoon. I'm Rob O'Hare, Affirm CFO. We've covered a lot of content today across Affirm's entire business, and in this last section, and with my time with you, we're gonna cover three more areas.
I'll start with a focus on the current state of our funding program. My colleague, John Marion, is gonna give an overview of the Affirm Bank initiative, and then I'll close with perspectives on our framework for future growth and profitability. With that, let's talk about how we fund the business. Affirm has achieved significant growth over the last several years, and as our business has scaled, we've continued to build and diversify our funding channels and relationships. The goal of our funding strategy is to ensure that funding is never a limiter to our growth. Historically, we've built our funding program across three primary channels: warehouse, ABS, and forward flow.
We'll review each channel shortly, but we hope the key takeaways are that we're highly diversified across approximately 200 unique funding partners, that we've built our program around multi-year committed funding relationships, and we're not overly reliant on any single partner or channel. Let's take a look at warehouse funding. We have roughly 15 warehouse partners, primarily large and multinational banks. Our warehouse facilities are typically used to fund loans on our balance sheet in advance of ABS issuances and also in advance of allocations to forward flow buyers. We tend to keep warehouse utilization rates low, so this channel plays an important role ensuring we always have excess capacity during peak seasonal periods and also across market cycles.
Moving to our ABS program, we utilize 2 types of ABS issuances, with the majority of our ABS funding coming in the form of revolving on-balance sheet vehicles and a lesser amount via off-balance sheet static issuances. Program-wide, we've reached roughly 150 unique investors, and we've raised over $7 billion in notes over the last 2 years. Since 2022, we've seen a 3.4x oversubscription rate for our offerings, and this strong demand has allowed us to build deep relationships with a blue-chip institutional investor base. Lastly, our forward flow program is our most capital-efficient funding channel and also our largest at roughly $13 billion in capacity. This capacity is spread across a diverse group of 20 institutional investors, including insurance carriers, pension funds, asset managers, and investment banks.
Our typical 2-year commitment from the loan buyer, and we have a strong track record of renewing and upsizing commitments with most partners. When Affirm sells a loan to a forward flow investor, we earn gain on sale revenue, and that loan moves off of our balance sheet. I will close the funding section with a quick perspective on the trends in our funding mix. As you can see, we have historically been almost evenly split between on-balance sheet and off-balance sheet funding, with warehouse and revolving ABS comprising the on-balance sheet funding and forward flow and static ABS comprising the off-balance sheet funding. As we look ahead to the future, we see an exciting opportunity to add deposit funding to the mix through the Affirm Bank, while also continuing to grow our existing funding relationships and channels.
With that, I'll turn it over to John Marion to share a bit about the Affirm Bank.
Hey everyone, I'm John Marion, I'll be president of Affirm Bank once it's approved. After spending 25 years in financial services at companies like JPMorgan and a few fintech sponsor banks, I joined Affirm in September to help Affirm with the bank charter application process and to build the bank. Our bank will be designed specifically to support Affirm's ecosystem and make Affirm's platform more resilient and more self-reliant over time. It will do that in 2 key ways. First, funding. As Rob mentioned, the bank will add a stable direct-to-consumer savings deposit product. Secondly, for bank diversification, creating Affirm Bank that will operate alongside our existing bank partners today. The bank's products are gonna be very focused.
On the deposit side, high-yield savings accounts that will be the primary balance sheet source of funding for the bank, and on the lending side, originating the same buy now, pay later loans from Affirm that you all know. To do this right, execution matters a lot, and we've built a team that's done this before, with deep bank operating experience alongside of Affirmers with experience operating effectively within the company. Let me pause for a minute and talk a little bit about what is an industrial bank, and why did we choose the industrial bank charter for Affirm? An industrial bank is a state-chartered bank. For us, we're seeking a Nevada charter, and that bank is FDIC insured. Industrial banks do not require that the parent company, Affirm, become a bank holding company, and that distinction is critical.
It allows Affirm to access the benefits of being a bank, including FDIC insurance, bank partner resiliency, and in practice, it means Affirm can continue to innovate, pursue new products, expand into adjacent businesses without the kind of holding company restrictions that apply to OCC or any other federally chartered bank. We think about building the bank in 3 phases. First, regulatory approval. We submitted an application in January, and we have been engaged with the FDIC as well as the State of Nevada. Second, to build the bank, including the people, the systems, and the processes that we need. Third, to launch and operate the bank with controlled growth throughout the de novo period.
By the end of the de novo period, we expect that Affirm Bank will originate roughly 40%-50% of Affirm's loan volume, and the bank will hold to maturity approximately 10% of those loans that it originates. Slightly less than 5% of all Affirm loans at the end of the de novo period will be funded with Affirm Bank savings deposits. Over time, as the bank scales, it will likely become an increasingly meaningful part of Affirm's funding mix and bank partner strategy. From a financial perspective, Affirm will make roughly $20 million investment in fiscal year 2027 to build the bank, and that's primarily related to onboarding employees and implementing the technology prior to the bank's opening.
Over time, Affirm Bank will earn, or Affirm will earn a small net benefit from lower funding costs and retaining the economics that we currently share with our bank partners, including interest on held for sale loans, loan origination fees, and virtual card issuance fees. Those benefits will be partially offset by the cost to operate the bank, primarily people, technology, deposits marketing, and loans and deposits servicing. I want to emphasize, the primary value of Affirm Bank is approved, improved resiliency that's gonna help support Affirm's long-term growth. Finally, Affirm will make an initial contribution, initial capital contribution of approximately $350 million to start the bank, and at the end of the de novo period, we're targeting roughly 20% return on equity.
We expect earnings to be sufficient to sustain the bank, with profitability coming in year 2, and therefore, we don't anticipate needing additional capital contributions from Affirm once the bank is operating. With that, I'll turn it back to Rob.
Thanks. All right, last section. I'm excited to be here and to be in a position to increase our framework for future profitability and to share the drivers that give us confidence in this new profitability targets. Before we get there, I think it's important to share some context around the current state of Affirm and what we're building towards. You've heard from my colleagues this afternoon about the capabilities we've built across credit, product, and engineering, and how these capabilities are resonating with merchants and consumers in a growing number of geographies. Today, the network that we've built consists of over half a million integrated merchant relationships and 27 million active consumers, with 4.4 million of those consumers also active on Affirm Card.
Those merchants and consumers drove over $46 billion of GMV in the last 12 months. Our network is large in scale, it is also growing rapidly and driving significant profitability. In the last three years, we've compounded revenue at 40% per year, and our adjusted operating margin has scaled to 28% in the last 12 months, which is up 29 points in the last three years. We look ahead, we're focused on executing against multiple secular growth drivers and expect to see continued growth across our merchant point of sale and PSP relationships, our direct-to-consumer offerings, like Affirm Card and Wallet partnerships, via international expansion, and also through Affirm Edge and agentic commerce. To put our current scale into perspective, compared to our last investor forum, we are over two times larger in GMV, and cardholders are more than an order of magnitude bigger.
At the 2023 investor forum just 2.5 years ago, we spoke about the path to $50 billion in annual GMV, a milestone that is now clearly in sight. Internally, we're now focused on achieving $100 billion in annual GMV as the next important scale point, and the new increased financial framework we're sharing today is meant to provide our shareholders with an understanding of how we expect to operate on the path to $100 billion. Looking at our historical GMV growth, as I mentioned, we've achieved $46 billion in GMV over the last 12 months. This represents a 36% compound annual growth rate since our last investor forum. Our growth in the last 12 months was nearly 40%, and we grew 35% in our most recent quarter.
As we look ahead to $100 billion in annual GMV, we expect the business to grow at a 25% rate or better. As we've shared, we have multiple growth vectors, we've tried to size their respective contributions here. First, our merchant point of sale program is expected to contribute over 10 points of total growth. Next, our direct-to-consumer offerings, namely Affirm Card and digital wallets, are also expected to contribute over 10 percentage points of total growth. Lastly, our expansion into new international markets is expected to contribute 1-5 percentage points of total growth. We view our Affirm Edge and agentic commerce efforts to be outside of this 25% growth target, but we also expect them to be additive to our total growth.
While we're proud of the growth that we've achieved, we're also proud of the profitable product set that has driven this growth. Our product set has consistently delivered industry-leading revenue and revenue less transaction cost, or RLTC, take rates. RLTC has seen a 49% compound annual growth rate since the last investor forum, and our RLTC take rate has exceeded 4.1% over the last 12 months, outperforming our long-range target of 3%-4%. Given the strength we've seen in RLTC take rates and our current expectations for future product mix, we expect to operate in a higher and more narrow RLTC take rate range as we progress towards $100 billion in annual GMV. We now expect to operate between 3.75% and 4% RLTC take rates.
We have increased confidence in this critical measure of profitability due to the improvements we've made in our funding costs and the expectations we have for loan product mix over the next few years. Consistent GMV growth and strong unit economics have resulted in significant operating leverage. Our adjusted operating income has eclipsed $1 billion in the last 12 months, and our AOI margins have increased to 28%. As we look ahead, we expect continued margin expansion. To achieve this, we're targeting at least 70% flow-through of growth in RLTC dollars to growth in adjusted operating income dollars. We're confident that this framework will allow us to both make the necessary OpEx investments to fund our ambitious growth plans while also allowing us to continue to scale our adjusted operating margins.
All of this leads to our new medium-term framework, which again, is indexed off 100 billion in annual GMV. At that scale point, we're targeting the following: revenue as a percentage of GMV in the 7.5%-8.5% range, RLTC as a percent of GMV in the 3.75%-4% range, GAAP operating margins of 20%-25%, adjusted operating margins of 30%-35%. There's also a few key assumptions that are informing our framework. In the coming quarters and years, we expect our GAAP effective tax rate to normalize in the mid-to-high 20% range. Lastly, we're targeting annual dilution of no more than 3%. With the assumptions above, this framework should culminate in GAAP earnings per share of $3-$4.
That's the end of our prepared remarks today, and we're now going to move to our last Q&A session.
Okay. Thank you, Rob.
Thanks.
We're going to invite all of our Affirm speakers back on stage now. You've got eight of us on stage. I'll be slightly off stage moderating the Q&A. Next slide, actually, sorry.
Chairs.
Not quite there yet. Okay. Okay, as a reminder, for those of you attending in person, we are going to have two people walking around with microphones. Please raise your hand, we'll do our best to get to you. If you're watching this virtually, please email us at Affirm IR@affirm.com. Before our Q&A, I do have a few thank yous to give while we set up here. First, thank you to our partner speakers that participated in the event. That was Will from Strike, Erica from Fiserv, Phil from Old National, and Harley, of course, from Shopify. I'd also like to thank those of you that took the time to come attend today. We've got almost 200 people in this room, which is really incredible. It's more than twice what we had the last time we held this event.
I'm sure there's many more watching virtually as well, so thank you for tuning in. I'd also finally like to thank the many Affirmers that participated in making this presentation possible. I think last count, there was well over 100 people at Affirm that participated in this, helped create it. I know we also have several board members in attendance as well, so we thank them for their time. For our executive team, come take a seat, please. Okay, with those ground rules read, just one final reminder, when you ask the question, please say your name and also the company you represent, and that way we can get you on the transcript. Start with you, Bryan.
Ask Michael some questions.
I want to ask you.
Michael.
It's very quiet over there. Michael had zero questions, so.
Maybe let's try another one while we sort that out. There, here we go.
All right, here we go. It's Bryan Keane at Citi. You know, one of the themes today is as you guys get bigger, it gets easier, so we see the metrics. As you get to $100 billion, do you get towards the higher end of some of those targets that you laid out? How does You know, you guys have been running a little bit north of 4% in RLTC. How does, as you get bigger and move into international and the card and the different metrics, how does that change the RLTC metric as we go forward to hit the $100 billion?
I can start. Obviously we've looked at our plans for growth and what we would expect the product mix, but also the geographic mix to be around the time that we land at $100 billion in annual GMV. Those are all factored into the framework. I think some of the things that we're doing on the product side are landing at, and we showed this in the deck, but they're landing at unit economics that are slightly below today's overall average. Of course, we have parts of the business that are operating at higher ranges as well. That mix of products really is 1 of the biggest assumptions that goes into the framework that we provided.
That's one of the reasons why, while we have operated above 4%, we do want to leave ourselves space to go execute on all of these really exciting growth initiatives. We think if we're able to stay in the ranges that were provided today, the business will be really, really healthy and drive the profitability and in turn, the cash flow generation that everyone wants to see.
John, I'm looking straight at you, let's go to you next.
Give me one second.
Raise your hand for No, we gotta get you on the webcast, actually, so wait for the microphone, please.
That's good to know.
John Hecht with Jefferies. just going to the bank, I know you said you're gonna convert, I think it was like 5% of the loans within the bank. What about revolving lines of credit tied to the credit card? Are those gonna be in the bank?
We don't have any revolving lines of credit. We do not have revolving lines of credit.
Okay. As you grow out the credit card product, will that?
We will not have revolving lines of credit.
It's not revolving. It's all closed-ended loans, and those-
Everything we do is closed-end.
Okay.
There's no revolving.
And those are-
That is off missions.
All right. Thank you for that.
Those are a part of the mix.
The question I have about the credit product, excuse me, you're giving your customers a lot more democracy of how they use their own credit. When you're, as you're seeing them use those options, what are they doing? Are they pushing out duration or term? Are they borrowing, and then as soon as they get, like, a bonus payment, paying it off? I mean, what are you seeing in terms of the behavior during that journey?
Oh, gosh. I mean, I think we see all of it. It really, I mean, obviously it depends heavily on consumers. The most salient observation worth sharing is that really what matters to a person in terms of how they're thinking about accessing credit and which of our sub-products they're using, you know, term lengths, all of that is it's very purchase size dependent, relative of the purchase size to their cash flow, their income. Where something like is a 0% important or are longer terms important is very specific to the person and to the purchase size.
We see a variety of behaviors, but we see patterns within that, and it helps us think about tuning promotional offers and, you know, what Vishal spoke to in terms of loyalty and those aspects of what is actually salient to this person for this specific purchase, and targeting that so that to maximize conversion of that purchase for that merchant, and that's how we think about it.
In fact, can I add one other thing? When they're using the revolving credit cards less, that money goes back into their pocket and they use it on Affirm, and there's a positive flywheel that we see because they're not paying late fees when they're behind, they're not paying revolving fees, and all of that money that they save goes back into their pocket, and their purchasing power goes up. We see positive behavior from our best customers.
Okay, why don't you take a question from the internet here? It's from Rothstein & Co., CPA's. They ask, and I think this is probably best for Wayne, please expand upon some of the most exciting opportunities within new verticals such as QuickBooks? Anything you can share in terms of use cases we're seeing there initially, specifically they cite, like, paying a handyman or something like that.
Sure. I'm actually gonna hand this over to Pat, who's been very close to our Intuit account.
Yeah, really excited about how we're launching with them. We're actually enabled on, I think as of this week, close to 1 million of their SMB merchants that are on the QuickBooks platform. We are in a exclusive deal over the next several years to work with them and tailor programs specifically for those SMB merchants. What's interesting about Intuit, which is actually part of the reason they chose us, is that they, not only do they offer B2B, they also do B2C, and then there's also B2B2C. It kind of gets very interesting in terms of the flow of funds and our presence there.
We're very excited about partnership because, again, in the same fashion as we are expanding with our partners, we have these design partnerships that really allow us to enter into these markets in both a safe way, it de-risks us entering it, and we work with providers and partners that really are experts in that field and help guide us as we go along. It's just the beginning with Intuit, and you're going to see more of that to come.
Timothy Chiodo from UBS.
Thank you. Timothy Chiodo, UBS. That 3.75-4, that is tight.
We know it's kind of wanting to go higher, it wants to go higher. You guys have a very nice way of reinvesting that back in price across products to drive more RLTC $. I was hoping you could expand upon how you plan to reinvest any of that upside into exactly that.
Sure, yeah, I mean, you know, I think we spoke to it a bit today already. Obviously, we're launching several new markets, right? It'll take time for those markets to scale and for us to make those markets as big and successful as they can be. That's one clear investment area. We've obviously been leaning into 0% offerings over the last several quarters now, and we expect to continue to use that as a way to both add new users to the Affirm network, but also to incentivize existing users as well. We've got The Big Nothing event happening tonight at midnight. Set your calendars.
Yeah, I think those are 2, like, very clear and obvious ways that we would invest some of the margin dollars, but I'm sure there will be others as we run the business for the next couple of years. I don't know if others would add.
I don't wanna get too deep into the complicated matters of mathematics with dollars, but one of the niceties of just getting bigger as an absolute dollar size, whatever that incremental thing that the 3.75 to 4 really wants to be, just multiply that by GMV. That's a lot more absolute dollars, which we can spend in more than just the actual running of the business, but developing of new things. I for one am looking forward to having more tokens. That's a joke.
We do have quite a lot of new stuff to build and I think that the growth opportunities are so significant, sort of the joke is still on what will we build next or first versus, you know, when do we start harvesting this cash flow?
Surprised Michael and Libor don't have some.
Connor? No, it's good.
Corrections to make.
Yeah. No, it's good.
Thanks. Connor Allen at JPMorgan. The 25% volume growth, up from the 20% before, and the components have shifted a little bit. It seems like the merchant side, a little slower, DTC a little faster, and then you have kind of international that seems better than before. Could you just talk through maybe your confidence across those, how you kinda came to those conclusions? And then on top of that, what would you need to see for Affirm Edge to then be kind of part of your algorithm as you're thinking about it?
Thanks.
Well, I mean, Yeah.
You're the P&L.
For the first two components of the growth algorithm, point of sale and direct to consumer, I do just wanna make sure everyone heard me. Those are minimums, right? There's a 10% minimum in terms of growth contribution. We're not putting a ceiling on what the growth of either of those businesses could be. I think, as we look ahead to the very, very near-term future, we would expect point of sale to be, you know, well above 10% in terms of total contribution to growth. That's one.
On the Affirm Edge point, I mean, I think, you know, as you heard today, we're out talking to banks, we're out working with our platform partners to have as many of those conversations as possible, and I think we will get to a point where we have signed engagements with these banks, and I think that will make the program that much more real for us, and I think that's when we would start to think about how big can this be and how it layers into the rest of the growth drivers that we've spoken to.
Diksha, here we go.
I tried to wait till the last because I think you've given some shiny numbers, everyone wants to focus on that.
Yeah.
Thank you. The question is a little bit more, and Adam kind of asked half of my question, like, are you solving the biggest problem that you want to solve? More from an expansion lens as well, right? Some of your peers, your rivals, they're, like, talking about global at get-go, the pace of expansion overseas. It's not like you're constrained on growth, right? Like, you can grow. What is the thought process around how you're planning that expansion? Like, what are your constraints? What is your consideration around that?
Yeah, I'll start a little bit, but Pat, I'm sure, has a much stronger point of view. We are not constrained by many things, but we are very mindful of the fact that we're entering jurisdictions where we're not necessarily the first, which means that we have to be the best at something at the get-go. showing up to the U.K. and saying, "We too do pay in three and pay in four 'cause it's the easiest thing regulatorily, capital underwriting," would've been undifferentiated. we took the road less traveled and said we're going to figure out how to do this in the longer terms, talking to merchants, hearing over and over again, "The demand is for longer term loans.
That's what you guys should do." That required a fairly complex set of conversations with everyone from capital partners to His Majesty's Treasury and so on and so forth. That, you know, we feel great about where we are now, but it took the right amount of time. Some markets are, I wouldn't say carbon copy, but they are connected to each other well enough, especially in European economies, where you can say one begets the other because some of the licensing regimes are exportable, et cetera, and others are not. The risk, if you will, is definitely not in the will we have enough merchants to go live with. You know, we have a fair number of batteries included given our global partnerships. Will we have the products? We think we do, but we hear it from the local merchants.
Regulatory regime and deep understanding of the local consumer mores, everything from how repayment happens, what's the least friction full mode, what are the downstream consequences of reporting to the local equivalent of credit agencies, are very important. We can definitely do more than 1 market at a time, and we absolutely expect to do so. I think there are many companies whose, you know, charred bodies or at least parts of their charred bodies are littering the roads to global expansion who said, "We're gonna lend money to everyone in every market." It turns out to be a thing that takes 3-12 months to find out if you're any good at it.
We're quite happy with the way things have evolved in the U.K., but we didn't enter it with a guarantee of victory, we had the right amount of trepidation. We will bring that trepidation to all the other markets. That said, every time we see success in market 1 and 2, the next set of expansions we think will do 3, 4, and 5, and 6, and perhaps we'll expand the funnel. That said, just sort of the other side of the argument and the reason we have taken our time to get to international, vast majority of commerce is local. There was a very, very long time before Visa owned Visa International because there's just not that much, I'm just gonna up and go from the U.S. to the U.K. and shop as if I exist in both places.
These are fairly locally and primarily driven, of course, by speeds of shipping, et cetera. We will experience network effects, I'm quite confident of that, in every market we enter. The cross-border commerce is a big deal, especially for some of our partners for sure, but it's not enough to create a truly sticky network effect in and of itself. It is still a one plus one plus one plus one. The synergies happen on some level, but I wouldn't sort of expect it to just be all at once after a certain point.
There's actually one thing that's worth double-clicking on that Max said because it is something that's common across our broader strategic initiative investment framework and how we think about all of them, not just international. There is a natural cadence to the rate at which we can grow products, new products, that is set by the fact that the product ultimately depends on monthly repayment, right, over some period of time. That sets a clock on really how you learn about consumer behavior, whether it's in a new market or even in the U.S. where it's a new product. You really have to understand how does the customer ultimately interact with it? What does it mean for the bottom line in terms of repayment?
As a result of it, when we think about strategic investment and, you know, what Rob showed of where we're putting money, we are always looking at and investing in multiple growth vectors that are largely orthogonal from each other in terms of the learnings and the feedback loops that we're generating, and we pursue them in parallel and allocate internal resources to match that framework. International and multiple markets is one of those investments. Obviously, we've heard about things like Edge, Card, Agentic, and others.
Okay. Try to go back this way. Rob Wildhack from Autonomous.
Hi, guys. Rob Wildhack with Autonomous Research. A question on the updated RLTC range and given how narrow it is. Is that strategically like a flag in the ground that these are the products we're gonna do, this is the mix, this is where the next $50 billion is gonna come from? If there was this great opportunity, say, in pay in 4, something that's lower margin, would you pursue that, or would you say we're sticking with what we laid out and that's why the range is both higher and narrower?
Again, I'll start. I think it's really just more simply a function of some of the very large products and programs that we have today and also just frankly the really high growth rates we see in those products and programs today as well. Just given the economic content that we're generating from the known programs and products, we just don't see a scenario where we deviate outside of that range, certainly not meaningfully below that 3.75. I think it's really just acknowledging that our biggest and in terms of card, our fastest growing programs are also our most profitable, that gives us a lot of confidence in that narrower range.
Well, I mean, I would just add that I think as there's new opportunities, right? We're going to go pursue them, like the stuff that Max is working on in his lab. I mean, we think obviously those have potential for different profiles, but they're on a different timeline, and we expect a, you know, a lot of opportunities. You know, we don't plan on stop growing at $100 billion. A lot of those things that are gonna take us past, you know, $100 billion are in the works. They're just, you know, to Rob's point, at a different scale point, relative to what the model says.
Go ahead, sir.
Thank you. David Koning at Baird. I guess my question's on data. You know, you talked a lot about using data increasingly making better credit decisions, offers, et cetera. We hear a lot about with AI, the endless amounts of data companies using more and more, and it's costing more. How are you kind of balancing that spend, that cost, with the production and then just data security on top?
I mean, we, you know, we're ultimately looking at it through the lens of productivity of, right, of employee productivity. When we think about how much are we spending on AI, how much are we spending on productivity, AI for productivity or for modeling or for improvements, I mean, we're looking at it through the lens of ROI, right? Like, are we actually getting something out of this? Is it producing more than what we're putting in? What we are seeing and what we're sticking to is that we are increasing the output of the employee base relative to what we're, you know, putting in on a dollar basis.
I mean, I think 70% incremental margins would put that in context. I think if we're flowing down, you know, a substantial portion of our incremental RLTC growth, it says a lot about the operating efficiency of what we're doing. If anything, I think those are tailwinds for the business in terms of the productivity benefit way exceeding the cost. And then in terms of data security, I think suffice it to say, we take it really seriously. I think your line from the infrastructure slide was really important, which is we don't take what we do very lightly. We joke a lot, plenty of Lebowski references in every letter, we take our day jobs pretty seriously, and data security is at the top of that list.
Moshe? You're here.
Thanks. Moshe Orenbuch at TD Cowen. You mentioned, you know, 10 points of growth coming from the wallets in a D2C. Could you talk a little bit of how much of that is coming from in-store commerce? Given how large in-store commerce is relative to e-commerce, could there be a time when that 10 is higher or whatever that contribution is actually higher than the traditional point of sale?
I'll start, in store is a very tiny but high growth part of the entire spectrum of where we are seeing the marginal incremental growth coming from. It's very exciting because, again, one of the key leading indicators that the product team looks at is product market fit and specifically the transaction per user. What we are seeing is that when customers are going in store and finding that transaction through the card or the wallet, they're actually coming back much faster for the next subsequent purchases. The TPU stat that Max had in the initial prologue was about how fast the frequency of the network is growing. If I take a slice and just add it to our direct to consumer channel, that frequency is much higher, and in-store as a proportion is also higher.
It's tiny, it's gonna grow fast, and we see no upper bound on it because, as we said, 85% of commerce is still in store, and now with cards and wallets, we have access to that commerce. Also, as we improve the product, because we fine-tune every single step in the process, there's a ways to go to how do we make this even simpler for the customer. The road is pretty long and meaningful ahead of us.
Okay, we've got two from the online channel that I think are pretty short or easy to answer. We'll start the first one, I think, for Wayne. The question that the investor had is, who takes the credit risk with the Affirm Edge? Is it us that takes it, or is it the issuer bank?
It is us.
It's us. Great. Okay, second question. Important clarification.
We like the risk.
We like risk.
This question comes from Daniel Perlin at RBC. He asks that, I think we'll probably disagree frankly with the first part of this question, but he says, "Well, in the early days of achieving your $50 billion GMV target, it was clear that lower income consumers were an appropriate target market. As you are scaling and re-envisioning reward constructs, do you believe the aperture will open up to the more affluent?
Well, uh-
I reject the premise.
Yeah. I actually will just say that.
No part of this question is interesting.
Yeah.
Everybody agrees, rejecting the premise.
No, I actually do agree.
I just wanted to say I reject the premise.
Yeah, it's fun to say. Our card holders are actually I mean, we talked about the super prime for 0% days. I mean, the stats speak for themselves. We cater to all of the FICO bands equally, and we love them all equally. They are using the products both on the merchant checkout and direct to consumer in ways that we feel that the value accretes to every single band because it's a better product. I don't think that either the first $50 billion was for lower income. We actually see higher income, higher FICO customers use it and like it more. We also see it in the prime, near prime as well.
The reason is, if you're revolving, you're paying that incremental dollar to the banks and the late fees, and that doesn't work for no matter how much your income or your FICO is. That is the short answer, then the rewards. The 0%, the longer terms, Everyone loves them.
FICO specific lens to that particular part.
We have a very short memory. I mean, we grew with Peloton, 95% of the online retail market were all 0% programs originally targeting the high-end consumer and the super prime users. We just extended those. I think even at our IPO, that was one of the concerns.
Yeah, one of the IPO, I was literally gonna go there, like I remember being asked over and over again, like when everybody buys themselves a Peloton and those people never default, are you guys done? Like It works for everyone. Different credit quality consumers derive different kinds of value from Affirm. That's a very fair observation. We never get to the, we know we're gonna lose a lot of money, it's okay, we're overcharging someone else for it. That's a thing that we don't do. Everyone else is welcome to use the product, we love them all. For different credit quality, the answer could be longer term. The credit rate is not that big of a deal.
For someone who is knee-deep in choices and credits, they're very much on the hunt for the best possible APR, and the number they prefer, of course, is zero.
Yeah, I mean, just one more drop of ink on this because I think it we're all pretty excited and passionate about it. I mean, you know, we have 27 million active users and our median income is $75,000 a year. I mean, we have a broad range of consumers, and we serve all of them, I think, quite well.
We'll probably do another five minutes or so of questions. Liani, was it you back there? Sorry. Yeah. Side of the room.
Hi, this is Giuliano Bologna from Compass Point. You know, I realize that when you obviously put out, you know, very helpful numbers when it comes to financial guidance, one of the categories that seems to be kind of outside of that or excluded in some ways is, you know, agentic or AI and LLM type partnerships. They obviously, a lot of those platforms have tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of weekly active users, and that's an enormous market that fits right into your product market fit, you know, in terms of online purchasing and online spend.
When you think about the different growth drivers, does that have the potential to become kind of a fourth leg to the stool when you think about, you know, the different drivers of, you know, merchant point of sale, Affirm Card and international? Does that have the potential to be material enough to really create its own fourth vertical when it comes to, you know, growth drivers going forward?
I don't see a reason why not. I think I mean, the thing is that it's early, and I think a lot of the things that we are saying here is that we have different products in different stages of the maturity life cycle. This one is early because we are just starting to shape the protocols. We just announced with Google in the morning. As this takes shape, to your point, the white space in front of us is immense. As agents take the drudgery and the mechanical work and start to do the things that humans actually want, Affirm's value prop just shines through and through. Affordability, As-Low-As messaging, purchasing power.
We feel that the way that this will actually shape a lot of things will change in front of us in ways that we haven't seen because you can have fully delegated, fully human in the loop, somewhere in the middle. In all of those cases, Affirm has a very specific role to play in our opinion. Short answer is we don't see a reason why it can't be the next big growth lever. That's why we presented it as such. We're not baking any specific things because the volume there is negligible right now across the industry, including Affirm. As these things take shape, we'll obviously have more to share.
You're already thinking ahead to Investor Forum 2030. We like it though. Maybe the side. Sorry. What have we got? Will Nance from Goldman. Yeah.
Will's getting off.
Hey, thank you for taking the question. Will Nance from Goldman. One question I wanted to ask around the long-term thought process, long-term targets was around capital allocation. You know, you announced one specific allocation of capital to the bank, which makes sense, and it sounds like that'll be self-funding from there. But obviously with GAAP profitability, there is a lot of organic capital generation. How are you thinking about organic needs to fund the growth in the balance sheet versus, you know, potentially evaluating capital return down the line? Thanks.
This is tailor-made for Michael.
Look, I don't think we're gonna say a lot more than what we said on the bank and that, you know, we like the way we fund the business today. If you think about the mix of on and off, you think about the mix of forward flow, on and off securitizations and of course, our warehouse business, I think that mix is a good mix. Not being precise there, the overall direction of travel is where we wanna be here. That means that the capital needs of the business are really consistent with what we've experienced over our recent history. Obviously, there's a really zesty funding market out there. It's really good for us. We don't plan on taking that to fundamentally change.
Even when you model that forward and think about a kind of consistent approach to finding the business, you still are gonna generate a pretty healthy amount of cash. We don't really wanna be too specific as to what we wanna do with it. We've announced, obviously, that we have the plan to retire the first convertible notes. We would continue. We have that coming up due in November. Those are pretty small in the scheme of the next three years. Beyond that, we really haven't communicated and aren't gonna share anything else today. Unless you want to, Rob.
No. I think, I think you covered it well. I mean, I think we're really excited about the cash that we're generating today. We generated about $350 million of cash in the last 12 months. But, you know, that's probably the first period where we generated that much cash. I think we're working through the retirement of the debt and, you know, the funding needs of the business will be sort of the first, the first outflow of cash for us. From there, I think we'll sort of reevaluate as we continue to scale, cash flow.
Kyle, you've had your hand patiently up. I think we'll take one more after this and then.
Cool. Kyle Joseph with Stephens. Just a very quick one. When should we expect slides? Just I was typing pretty fast, not that fast.
Question for me. Yes, they actually should be posted, I'm looking at Maggie over here. I think we're posting them right now. Couple of minutes.
Yeah, sorry, I didn't mean to put you on the spot there, Zane. My bad.
Easy.
Follow up, just I think in 2023 you kinda got the question about the competitive environment. I think you covered it. Basically, it's broad because of the amount of products you have. Just kinda a quick update there, and how you see that evolving with the Bank, as little as you're gonna talk about the Bank. Thanks.
The bank is actually sort of orthogonal to the competitive situation. I think it helps us regulatorily. It sets us up for some future efficiencies, but it's not a thing that we see as an inherent competitive advantage. If anything, we are trying to make ourselves as accessible and friendly to our would-be partner banks, and you've heard from some of our partners on stage today. I think that part of the business is highly synergistic. That said, in payments and in consumer finance in general, it's co-opetition all the time, all the way. There's never been a monopoly in payments full stop because it's such an enormous market. Everybody specializes.
Everybody partners with someone else for the thing they're not specialist in, and everybody overlaps and competes with those same partners, just because it's a complex market, which is why, you know, we all like it so much. The space is really attractive. If you look at these margins, you know, even the numbers we just upgraded for you, it would be foolish to believe that no one else will come. In fact, everyone has come. We think that our advantages are durable. We think that we have gotten better at the things that we consider to be the moats and the advantages. The catalog of custom merchant contract has, I don't know, almost 100x since the IPO, if I'm doing my math correctly, so that's a fairly impressive digging of that moat.
Our models are now being built on also 2 orders of magnitude more data. That's actually a correct statement. Everything we do that we think we are uniquely great at, that separates us from the pack, we've gotten much better and no accident. We've invested in all those things. It's a little bit easier to compete, I think, in the areas where we are selling the thing that we have put the original flag in the ground for. Every time we go to expand, be it new geographies, new products, it is never empty. There's always someone there who is saying, "Well, that's my turf.
What are you doing here?" Our answer has to be, "We're here to provide a new and different kind of value." If we're just here to make it cheaper, or we're here to undermine your business, it's kind of, you know, it's a stupid excursion. We shouldn't be a part of it. What we are very good at is saying, "Wait a second. This needs a spotlight." Consumers here are overpaying. They don't understand that they are. That's a great opportunity for us. Like we're very good at saying, "Actually, let's flush out all the gunk. This is a bad product. We can do a better job." We love innovating in products. We love innovating in risk, where consumers are not given access to credit or given access to financial products because the incumbents think the risk is too much.
We think through better use of math, we can actually underwrite it and price it correctly and not rely on slop like late fees, et cetera. Those are the areas where we've been investing. It's become easier to compete. I think I'll actually let Pat and Wayne touch on sort of what it's like out there fighting with our esteemed competitors, but it's never going to be non-competitive. This business is in no danger of being a monopoly, but the fact that we are upping our margin rates should give you a pretty good sense for where we think we're headed in terms of our ability to defend our market. You guys want to add on the revenue side?
I honestly don't have a sort of snappy answer for you. I've been in this space for 10 years selling BNPL, and the environment's always changing. Different competitors are doing different things. I think what has worked for us is just focusing on our own capabilities and extending our lead, and maybe part of it's getting older and wiser. You can't change what competitors are doing, so focus on yourself, and I think that's been paying off well for us. Great. On that note, we are at the end of today's event. For those of you attending in person, if you turn to your right, you'll see the gates have opened to the bar. If you go beyond that, we actually have product demos off to the left that you'll probably want to take a look at.
If you go even further to that, beyond that, there's a terrace that looks out over Times Square. We encourage you to enjoy the view and the beautiful weather today. Thank you all again for joining us