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Buy now, pay later specialist Affirm Holdings Inc. says Amazon.com Inc. extended by five years its deal with Affirm to offer installment-payment services, an option first offered in 2023. The move comes as Affirm posted $933.3 million in revenue for its 2026 fiscal first quarter.
Affirm, in a shareholder letter, also announced it expanded its deal with Shopify Inc. to offer its BNPL option to Shop Pay users in the United Kingdom, a service it launched in the U.S. in 2021 and expanded to Canada earlier this year. San Francisco-based Affirm says these partnerships and ones like them with Worldpay, a unit of FIS Inc. to make the BNPL service available to software platform clients, bolster its position.
Affirm, in the quarter ended Sept. 30, says it handled $10.8 billion in gross merchandise volume, a 42% increase year-over-year. GMV is the total dollar amount of all transactions on the Affirm platform minus refunds. That figure is on 41.1 million transactions, a 51.2% increase from 27.2 million in the year-prior quarter.
In the letter, Max Levchin, Affirm founder and chief executive, attributes its performance to such deals and its offering. “Results like these are never an accidental success, and the last several quarters really felt like the team has accelerated from strength to strength,” Levchin noted.
At least one equity analyst says Affirm is securing its position in BNPL. “Affirm is the undisputed BNPL leader, in our view, in an emerging consumer tender category with just over 1% of U.S. spend. Over time, we anticipate BNPL will capture a larger share of discretionary spend and Affirm will be the principal beneficiary,” wrote Andrew W. Jeffrey, an analyst at William Blair & Co. LLC, in a research note.
As for the partnerships with Amazon and Shopify, Jeffrey suggests there’s room for more growth. “We estimate that it has low-single-digit share of wallet at Amazon and around 10% Shop Pay attach. We are encouraged that the company extended its Amazon relationship five years, highlighting what we see as strong shared economics,” he added.
For the quarter, Affirm posted an $80.7 million profit, reversing a $100.2 million loss the year prior. Affirm also says the number of active consumers increased to 24.1 million, up 24%, and its active merchant count swelled to 419,000, a 30% jump. The merchant tally was boosted by the wallet partnerships and the launch of several deals with independent software vendors.
