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BFD Expert Voices - Private Credit

BFD Expert Voices

Affirm CEO Max Levchin says the company is sticking with commerce and financing, even as other fintechs push into broader banking and money movement products.

Why it matters: Affirm is betting that a focused lending and payments network still has plenty of room to grow.

This interview was edited for length and clarity.

Axios Pro: More and more fintech companies are trying to become horizontal financial superapps, while Affirm has stayed pretty narrowly focused. How do you think about focus versus growth?

Levchin: "I am skeptical of superapps in the U.S. and North America in particular. My iPhone is my superapp. The icons have all the functionality I want, and I get to curate it.

We are really, really early. There are still massive swaths of completely unaddressed transactions, segments that would clearly benefit from buy now, pay later, and yet we are barely scratching the surface."

"If you have something that's growing at 35% year over year, it's a little bit criminal to ask the question, why don't we take a break from that and go off and see if an adjacency makes sense?

It's not the same thing as saying we're just going to do this one tiny little thing. It happens that the thing we're doing has a huge opportunity."

Where could Affirm expand from here: B2B financing, international, or more consumer products?

"The short answer to all three things is 'OK, but not all at the same time.' 

We already do a little bit of what's called B2B financing. We focus on really small, kind of sole-prop, couple-person partnership type financing.

Geographically, we're live and ramping in the U.K. pretty actively at this point, and we're feeling pretty good about that. We've announced that we're gonna go to a bunch of other countries next. We're definitely marching through Europe."

"We definitely have some really fun ideas. But the main set of products are almost too growthful to feel good about saying, 'Hey, let's take a moment and go launch this completely different thing.'"

You applied for an industrial loan charter in Nevada. What does that solve for Affirm?

"The single most important reason for that is regulatory certainty. 

We are a bank-partnered fintech. We're a non-depository lender, which is a well-established legal and regulatory regime in the U.S., but it's definitely not nearly as stable and long-tenured as a bank lender."

Would a charter change how Affirm funds loans?

"Our scale is such that, for all intents and purposes, we are using ABS markets and all the other forms of loan funding effectively forever."

You highlighted AI-driven productivity in your shareholder letter at a time when other companies are announcing AI-driven layoffs. Does that mean Affirm will need fewer engineers?

"The idea of 'Let's get rid of some engineers because we have so many engineering cycles thanks to tokens' just seems totally counterintuitive. We're very far from saying we have too many humans here."

What are you seeing in consumer spending?

"The underlying story here is more than anything, our consumer is shopping. They're buying pretty reliably. It doesn't look like they are particularly changed in their behavior, even with the macro uncertainty."

The Affirm Card is one of your fastest-growing products. Why aren't you opening availability more widely?

"We don't market outside of our existing user base. The models we use for the Card, from an underwriting perspective, are a little more conservative.

Any lending product in general, if you are at scale and you're trying to grow it artificially fast, frequently enough, you come to regret it."

Affirm CEO Max Levchin on focus, AI and the Affirm Card

Affirm believes BNPL still has plenty of room to grow.

illustration of Affirm founder and CEO Max levchin surrounded by rectangles and cutouts of money

Photo Illustration: Tiffany Herring/Axios, Photo: Courtesy of Affirm

Affirm CEO Max Levchin says the company is sticking with commerce and financing, even as other fintechs push into broader banking and money movement products.Why it matters: Affirm is betting that a focused lending and payments network still has plenty of room to grow.

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Affirm CEO Max Levchin on focus, AI and the Affirm Card

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