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A new card product that taps the user’s checking account for in-full purchases or installments is in beta testing with “several hundred people,” at buy now, pay later specialist Affirm Holdings Inc., the company’s chief executive, Max Levchin, told equity analysts late Thursday during a session to discuss the company’s results for its fiscal fourth quarter, which ended June 30. He added that testing of a new buy now, pay later service for e-commerce giant Amazon.com Inc. is “ongoing virtually day and night,” though he stopped short of saying when the service will roll out.
The beta test for the new debit card, dubbed Affirm Debit Plus, is expected to wrap up next month, Levchin added, though he stopped short of saying when it will become commercially available. The company clearly has high hopes for the tech-driven card, with Levchin indicating Affirm’s goal to make it the “top-of-wallet primary transacting device.” He said he has been testing the card himself with daily coffee purchases, and indicated there is still “lots of cool stuff to add” to the product, without mentioning specifics. Already, Levchin told the analysts, the product’s features are “very close to being indistinguishable from magic.”
San Francisco-based Affirm has investigated, and tried, card products before. It first indicated in February it would introduce later in the year a debit-like card, then called the Affirm Card. The company also offers a Visa-branded card product, called Affirm Anywhere.
Referring to the Amazon test, Levchin said Affirm is “working hard to make sure [it] is successful. We want to deliver the best service.” The Amazon deal, which was announced late last month, has made Affirm “the undisputed [buy now, pay later] provider to the enterprises,” Levchin said. But he stressed the importance to Amazon and other commerce giants Affirm hopes to serve of “treating customers right, without charging late fees, without gotchas in the fine print.”
Levchin also made clear that success with Amazon will help clinch Affirm’s ambitions to work with more of these giants. Already, the company’s contract with Canada-based commerce platform Shopify Inc. has helped swelled its active merchant count to 29,000 from 5,700 at the end of June 2020, according to data released Thursday. Meanwhile, its active consumer count has nearly doubled to 7.1 million.
For the quarter, Affirm reported $2.48 billion in gross merchandise volume, a 106% increase year-over-year. Revenue grew 71%, to $262 million. The results in part reflect prior acquisitions, such as the $300-million deal Affirm made in April to buy Returnly Technologies Inc.
