Affirm Holdings, Inc. Price & Performance (AFRM)

Before we begin, I would like to remind everyone listening that today's call may contain forward looking statements. 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 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. In addition, today's call may include non GAAP financial measures. These measures should be considered as a supplement to and not a sub and not a substitute for, GAAP financial measures. For historical non GAAP financial measures, reconciliations the most directly comparable GAAP measures can be found our earnings supplement slide deck is available on our Investor Relations website. Hosting today's call with me are Max Ledge Firm's Founder and Chief Executive Officer Michael Linford, Firm's Chief Operating Officer and Rob O'Hare, Affirm's Chief Financial Officer. In line with our practice in prior quarters, we will begin with brief opening remarks from Max before proceeding immediately into questions and answers. On that note, I will turn the call over to Max to begin.

Thank you, Zane.

Another great quarter. So I do not feel a strong need to expound at any length on the numbers. They speak for themselves. I do want to take a moment to thank my frequent partner in crime and our President, Libor, whose name is not, in fact pronounced Libar. Though that would make for an epic joke. Here at Affirm for ten years. And he and I met over thirty years ago, both of us studying computer science at University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. Affirm isn't even our first rodeo together, but be remiss in not taking a moment to thank him not only putting up with me for ten years, but more importantly keeping our engineering product operations and perhaps most importantly, credit efforts humming along with his typical Eastern European grumpy call. Thank you, Liber. Here's to many more years together. Back to Usain.

Thank you, Max. With that, we will now take your questions. Operator, please open the line for our first question. Our first question is from Ramsey Elisale with Barclays. Please proceed.

Hi. Thanks for taking my question this evening.

Terrific.

Results. I wanted to ask about the noticeable increase in 0% loans and just ask you about how you're deploying those.

Are you opening new merchant doors with them? Are there particular verticals targeting? Is it for existing partners? Like is there a sort of a strategy behind it or is it just more broad based?

The very short answer is all the above, but it's a great question. You, Randy, for asking it.

First of all, these are programs where merchants and sometimes manufacturers donate, if you will, parts of their margin to our borrowers to give them essentially interest free or sometimes [indiscernible] [indiscernible] it's very powerful for a good reason not paying interest at all, obviously, the compelling reason for someone to pull the trigger on buying. When our merchants turn towards growth, like they frequently do in calendar fourth quarter, they look for ways to do promotions. There are a handful of well understood ways of doing it. One such way is discounts, your typical 10%, 20% off.

Compromises pricing integrity and teaches consumers to wait for the next 10% sale. Channeling the same promotional dollars into reduced APRs or zero APRs is very powerful because on the one hand allows them [indiscernible] Hey, here's a reason to buy on the only at the same while at the same time saying the price is the price, we're not discounting. And so our long term merchants know this really well. Some of our earliest merchants really pioneered this practice. We've since really industrialized this by creating tools where they can do this essentially with very little work on our part. And so that's what's on display. And we'd said, I think in the last quarterly call that that's a thing we're going to lean into and we've delivered on that very strongly. Thing that's really worth highlighting here that's maybe sort of doesn't mean the eye immediately, We now have a very sizable audience that is fueled direct to consumer in our app and with our card. [indiscernible] for a long time, these promotions were largely available on our merchants' points of sale online. We have now offered them an opportunity to bring these promotions essentially syndicate them across the entire [indiscernible] Which is to say they're available in our app on our card, and across many of the wallets where we're integrated.

So you can see at the beginning of Affirm Affirm syndication strategy really play out where these offers that we negotiate with merchants on our consumers behalf are available across all the programs. And you'll see this narrative repeated in things like universal financing programs that I'm sure we'll talk about in a second. But it's really, really important to us. Us. The network is valuable because it is aware of the SKUs, aware of the transactions. And delivers great unique reasons for people to buy for consumers to buy on every surface where we play. So we will see more of this. You'll see things that are not immediately visible to the naked eye lead into the strategy. Thank you. One follow-up for me. You came in above your 3% to 4% RLTC guide this quarter. And I think you've indicated in the past you you'd move to reinvest that excess RLTC rather than just letting it flow through to profits. What does that look like right now? Does that mean opening the credit box a bit more, maybe subsidizing some of these 0% loans Does that then flow through to higher volumes? Like what should we be looking out for in terms of the P and L impact of that reinvestment of the excess ROLCC?

Yes. I think certainly leaning into zero subsidizing 0% and even the 0% product is slightly lower margin for us than our interest bearing products. So taking a program that historically has been interest bearing and introducing some 0% into that program would be slightly margin dilutive, but we think a great thing our network in terms of what it does for reaching a broader cross section of consumers. So yes, I think the growth in 0% in a quarter where we had really, really strong RLTC margins. I mean, that's not a coincidence. That's something that we're actively trying to do more of. Got it. Thanks so much.

Our next question is from Will Nantz with Goldman Sachs. Please proceed.

Hey, I appreciate you taking the question. I wanted to kind of follow-up sort of on the last two questions combined. I know you're talking about leaning into 0% loans. I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about just the ROTC margin profile of some of that incremental growth. I know that's a lever that you guys have to manage the margin. Just I guess where are you in that strategy? And obviously, there were some kind of I think you caused out a couple of benefits benefits to the margin from some of the loan sales this quarter.

But just kind of where do you kind of see a tipping point from a margin perspective where you start to lean in a lot harder? And are you doing that or was the ramp in 0% more a function of some of these kind of merchant driven promotions this quarter?

Yes, I'll start and then Rob can pile on. I think We definitely think long term we want to be in between 34%.

That doesn't mean that we would do things that we don't think are good for the business. And so we think about investing dollars or trying to drive incremental growth we still want to do it in a way that makes good financial sense. So we think about the credit question that was asked earlier, it's important to us that we don't dilute our performance on credit overall as that's thing that's allowed us to execute so well in the capital markets. How important that is over the past several years and really have come to value capital markets appreciation for our execution there. And so we're really thoughtful about things that we do want to do The framework of 3% to 4% remains the long term doesn't mean a quarter might be above and the bar for investment inside of a quarter is still really high. We think it's really important that we're putting dollars to work in ways that make sense. For example, investing in expanding really compelling APR offers like 0% and fixed APR Affirm, is because of the positive selection that we do get from credit. So as Rob mentioned, those are actually a lower profile overall, but with also a lower credit profile, lower credit loss profile.

Which is obviously attractive to the overall portfolio.

Yes. And also I think we're still fine grained in terms of where we can set cutoffs for 0% that we don't need to make a huge or long term bet. We can iterate on setting the right approval thresholds to make sure that we're attracting the sorts of consumers that we want to attract and that we're we're running these programs at the margin profile we want to run at.

Got it. Appreciate you taking the question guys. Our next question is from Matt O'Neill with FT Partners. Please proceed.

Thanks so much for the question.

I was just curious entering the quarter, I believe you were pointing to a 3.8% RLTC margin.

And this quarter benefited from $60,000,000 collectively.

Between the securitization and loan sales. Did that did those two amounts kind of come and contribute together as expected or was that a bigger than expected benefit? I'm just trying to sort of parse the expected versus realized impact to the margin in the quarter. Yes. Thanks for that question. I think it's really important to be really clear on this. When we gave the guidance In November, we talked about the capital markets pipeline as being a key part of our confidence in that guide, if you recall. And that was in reference to the deals that we were working on.

And had confidence we would execute. So not all of those deals incremental to our outlook. It is the case that the pricing we were able to execute at was better than we thought, but not all of the benefit that we had associated with those deals was unexpected. We planned on doing those transactions and we had a certain meaningful portion of that already in the number. But it helps explain why we were ahead of our goals, which were already set, we think, on the high end of the range.

Thanks so much. And as a follow-up, I know it's always a delicate subject on wallet partners, but it was mentioned in the release. I figured I would ask was there anything there that came in better than sort of expectation or plan or any sort revised outlook as we turn into calendar '25 here with respect to Wallet Partners? Thank you. And appreciate the movie quotes.

Finally someone who cares. [indiscernible] generally speaking, very pleased with the wallet integrations They're shipping up to be a really meaningful part of the business Across the board, the metrics on these integrated wallets [indiscernible] [indiscernible] good repeats they add to the transaction per user averages, they add to conversion metrics that we track internally, they are accretive on the credit quality side of the equation, so all in all, we're quite happy with what's happening there.

A really important piece of our work sort of echoing a little bit to the answer to Randy's question, we've been quietly busy making sure that consumer offers are harmonized across wallets, and not wallet integrations.

And that's really been Just driving quite a lot of nice engagement. And the purpose of that, of course, is to make sure that consumers understand that whatever door they choose, if there's a Affirm logo on that door, they're going to get the same quality of service, they're going to get the same Affirm, same rates, etcetera. And so that's been a really important, although kind of [indiscernible] behind the scenes effort that also contributed to the the bullet Affirm. I don't think we are at liberty to offer any updates to the forecast or models related to this thing, but we're quite pleased with what's happening so far. Thank you.

Our next question is from Dan Dulev with Mizuho. Please proceed.

Amazing quarter.

As always, can you maybe Max and team can you give us an update on The U. K. Launch specifically you're moving into a territory where your incumbent is a market leader. So given that your product is much more diverse than just paying for how do you think the share market evolution can go there over time and how much share can you take from the incumbent over time in Europe? Thank you.

I think it's a little early to prognosticate share taking I will note that by all public sources, we took share in The U. S. From our various competitors here quite nicely. So at least past experience bodes well.

You're totally right. We do have diverse array term offerings and the ability to deliver these really sophisticated subsidized APRs even for longer terms, There's definitely very real market pull One of my meetings today was actually with a prospective merchant quite a meaningful player in The U. K. And it's very clear that the market is hungry for things like twenty four month loans and thirty six month loans because the incumbent banks who provide that sort of product are just not really willing to approve from what I can tell at all, but I'm sure some people get alone, but most don't. And our pure play competitors are just not in that space any kind of a meaningful way. And we're coming in loaded for that effort and excited to deliver our value and it seems like the merchants are impatiently asking us not will you, but how quickly and much can we do together. So very excited about the opportunity. I think last we talked, I joked that we have dozens and dozens of transactions At this point, it still dozens and dozens, but many. So that's better. And more than a handful of merchants now. So we're still in the testing phase.

We're seeing all the metrics that we need to track to feel confident rolling it out widely. In the letter, you'll note that I mentioned that Shopify is our first major enterprise scale integration that's going to be live relatively soon. So we're definitely the right time to check-in on uptake with a wide group of merchants as soon as that goes I don't pre announce I can speak to it freely now.

Sorry.

Thank you, Max.

Amazing results again. Our next question is from Kyle Peterson with Needham and Company.

Company. Please proceed.

Great. Wanted to ask on the funding mix moving forward. Are you guys looking to expand and add more of these deals kind of like the Sixth Street partnership seems like a really good win. Are you guys looking at more deals kind of similar to this? Or how should we think about the mix funding moving forward between warehouse, ABS and some of these forward flow agreements? Yes. We are really proud of the progress that we've made in capital markets this quarter. Our team has really executed very well out there. Partnership with Sixth Street is really an incredible leap forward for our program. It's a big program though. So I wouldn't expect us to do the super near term a bunch more like that in that size and scale. It's a pretty big partnership and we spent a lot of time thinking about who and how we were going to going to partner there. Now that being said, I think it is reflective of a very constructive market [indiscernible] really does value the asset that we create.

And so we're going to continue to take advantage of that. [indiscernible] are very thoughtful around scaling our capital program. We think about where we'll be in three and five and maybe even ten years. And make decisions that are constructive towards enabling the kind of scale that we're building to. So at the Investor Forum, last November, a year and a half ago, we talked about getting to $50,000,000,000 in GMV. And so the team is hard at work in enabling that that the capital program scale.

To allow us to deliver against that goal. And that will be here before we know it and when it is, we'll take an eye towards the next milestone. Continue to scale the capital program and to get to those kind of scale points, it's important that we are are thoughtful that we aren't leaning towards the flavor of the year with respect capital markets in our are designing a program that is durable and can survive multiple economic scenarios and conditions. And what that means is yes, the foreclo market, in particular, partnerships with private credit and insurance companies are really right now and we're going to continue to take advantage of those as much as we can but we're also thoughtful around making sure that we have a good reputation and good execution in the ABS markets consistently. And the two really do work with one another. About the only program for us that is less a piece of real scale enablement is our warehouse business. And that's mostly because of the attractive financing that we get in the ABS market combined with obviously the good economics we have in the Fourth Floor world. Great. Thank you. And then I guess just a quick follow-up on Sixth Street in particular.

So on the shareholder letter, you guys mentioned that's expected to start ramping up in second half of twenty twenty five.

Is that like a phased launch that they'll start smaller and the volumes will ramp or is once they the volume start, should we is that a fairly steady run rate or how should we we think about the contribution and the ramp time with Sixth Street? Yes.

It should ramp over the course of the next [indiscernible] all the way to its maximum levels overnight. We'll be very very thoughtful about scaling it carefully over the course of next year.

All right. Thank you very much for the color.

Our next question is from Rob Wildhack with Autonomous Research. Please proceed.

Hey, guys.

Active customers were up 23% year over year. I think you noted in the letter that's 40% APR growth and then see, I guess, how sustainable do you think that is in the 20% -plus range?

I think the root causes of these accelerations are multiple quarters maybe even multiple years in the making We were actually quite focused on increasing our active consumers and it's gratifying to see the results compound.

Probably the most impactful project in that effort were our focus on direct to consumer. So the card obviously is a great product to increase engagement, reawaken, if you will, dormant consumers that have transacted with us sometime in the past, but haven't used this in a while. So bringing them back is a really important effort. It also does not hurt to continue expanding e commerce coverage, the more counters, if you will, the more checkouts were on the better the probability that someone who used Affirm before will say, hey, I remember that product that was great, better than my credit card, I should use them again. [indiscernible] all those things add up to just a little bit more conversion, just a little bit better reengagement For the audience of doubt, it is not a some sort of a dramatic credit machinations behind the scenes, which people always suspect, wait a second, you just opened up the box and be apparent in the credit results, but for the avoidance of doubt, we have been very steady handed on credits Yes, the best I can offer is it was a very deliberate prioritization on our part about a year ago to focus on active consumers and like everything else we do here, when we focus on something, it typically takes a little while, but the results [indiscernible] Okay.

Thanks.

And then on the non GAAP operating expenses, sales and marketing in particular, it looks like that was up quite a bit sequentially. You've typically not done a lot of direct sales and marketing. So just wondering what the driver was there and if you expect non GAAP sales and marketing to stay at that like $30,000,000 level going forward? We did, Rob, we did make some investments some new program launches, but the marketing spend that we had to Max's earlier point it really wasn't focused on direct user acquisition.

We continue to see most of the user acquisition coming from point of sale as Max alluded to. So really not a change in strategy. In terms of the go forward spend, we haven't broken out the OpEx into the various cost centers, but you can see from the guide, we do expect OpEx to be roughly in line with Q2 in both Q3 and Q4. So, it's going to be a pretty similar OpEx envelope as we look ahead to the two quarters. Okay. Thank you.

Our next question is from Reginald Smith with JPMorgan. Please proceed.

Hey, guys. Congrats on the quarter. I was hoping to dig in a little bit on some AI You mentioned, I guess, the chatbot and the and the shareholder letter I was curious how you guys are thinking about AI and whether it can be used for more commercial purposes. I don't know products that face off against consumers. And then the second piece of that question, is how AI has changed your thinking on headcount in which you can get done with your current Size of your staff? And if that's changed over the last twelve months?

Thank you.

Thank you, Reggie. Good questions both.

We we try to I mean, we're all contrarians here. So when the industry zigs, we zag, we don't talk that much about AI, but we've been using machine learning and artificial intelligence since inception. All of our underwriting and broad fighting is all built on what is now called AI We have a lot of really cool stuff that doesn't meet the eye that we just [indiscernible] brag about too much, but for what it's worth, a lot of the most modern transformer architecture approaches to model building is something we're actively investing in internally for all the same things we accomplish with more traditional machine learning and even some sort of really innovative stuff. And the kind of thing where I'd love to dig into it and probably half the call would get very bored. Of my rant. But I literally spent part of my morning looking at a completely novel transformer architecture design that we think we're going to pick up some really interesting results results from in fighting fraud. So that's entirely. In terms of actually the underwriting and anti fraud type stuff. We are engaged in deploying AI tools for productivity purposes [indiscernible] is absolutely a productivity or operating leverage enhancer across the team, thereby giving us choices in hiring and allowing us to focus on hiring specialists sort of higher caliber versus more entry level jobs not just in customer service, but in things like engineering, etcetera, etcetera.

And so pretty excited about that. We're a fine example, I think I may have given before, but one of my favorite ones, We have 300 and something thousand active merchants The total number of merchant contracts we have signed is in hundreds of thousands. Anytime we're asking ourselves we launch this new product, Do our merchant contract allow us to do so? Some human somewhere is going to open up 300,000 documents and that's not going to be easy if you ask an equivalent of a well trained LLM, you can answer that question in seconds. And so that's a fine example of where our legal team benefits from generative AI without the need to expand the headcount. So we're doing that in legal, we're doing that in compliance, we're doing it in accounting, marketing, etcetera. So all of that is exciting and happening. And then on the consumer side, I'm going to bite my tongue and not pre announce anything.

But obviously the tools that or the opportunities that come out of Gen AI are pretty awesome and we'll have our say and products to show for it when we're ready.

And I guess if I can just kind of follow-up you get a finer point on it. You guys gave [indiscernible] I guess how much and even at your Analyst Day, like how much AI is kind of baked into that leverage? Is there still did you contemplate that fully or how should we think about that? You follow my question?

Think so. Rob, do you want to opine? Yes, again, I think what we're doing with AI has sort of been an inherent part of how we've operated the business and as Max said since inception. And so so we really did take a hard look at driving efficiency in the business that was over two years ago now and we've asked and demanded for operating leverage in every operating plan that we've built. And so I think finding ways to do more with less is just part of how we've been operating. So it's hard to really quantify, Reggie, but always looking to sort of be as efficient as we can and to to scale the business without adding tons of employees.

Perfect. No, that sounds great.

Great quarter.

Our next question is from Andrew Baugh with Wells Fargo. Please proceed.

Hey, thanks for taking the question and nice set of results here.

In the shareholder letter, you talk about the redesign of the firm apt and focusing on the utility. Maybe if you can just give us a little bit more color on what you've learned about the redesign and how Affirm is becoming more of a marketplace and what kind of other opportunities that's kind of leading to when we think about the Affirm card longer Affirm? Getting to that level of an average use and scale that you talked about in the past?

Sure.

And it got edited a little bit in the final hours of the letter writing, but many of the changes we built last quarter, which is what the letter is referring to, have only rolled out now for this one. And are still rolling out. We don't change UX willy nilly. And so you'll see a few more like the app will look different for example at a while. It still looks almost the same today, but Some bits are different, more obvious changes will happen on the UX front. If you sort of follow the app carefully, you'll see that we're leaning in more and more into this notion that Affirm network is this really rich collection of merchants that at any given time are offering these staggering 0% deals either funded by the retailer or the manufacturer or both. Our consumers have come to expect that the Affirm app is a place where they can find these deals. And for a while, it was kind of an organic thing that we sort of put together because people ask I used to go on to Reddit and read people asking the question, hey, where can I find an Affirm 0% Affirm?

At some point, it gave me the idea. We're really you should be able to find Affirm 0% deals, maybe in the Affirm app, that would be a good place.

So we started there, it was a catalog and our deal tab in the app is a little bit of that [indiscernible] we're now fielding close to hundreds of thousands of searches week. And rising rapidly in the app looking for these 0% deals, obviously, naturally leads to an opportunity to say, hey, someone will want to be featured there and we're very careful not to God forbid, pit our merchants against each other. It's not a comparison shopping engine or anything like that. It's really a place to showcase the exciting offers that our retailers are bringing out to Affirm shoppers. And so we keep on leaning to that. We keep on seeing better conversion. I think A quarter or two ago, I rattled off that the search to transaction initiation rate is 25%. Last I looked, it's clip 30. So people are using this really effectively to find reasons to say yes to buying. And so we'll keep doing that. There's a couple more things coming into the app that are probably better experienced than described by me. So I'll stop myself from revealing too much, but it's entirely about just making the card a more convenient thing, okay, in I've talked about in the past that as much as I love my favorite child, the card, there's still so much to do in terms of user interface improvements.

We just updated a little bit of the transaction planning flow, so you can really quickly figure out what your purchasing power is and what will happen if you swipe the without asking for a loan upfront, etcetera. So all of that is a long list of features that we're building, but all of it is all about just finding one, two, three more points of growth for the carton. It's already obviously growing really well, but we're not going to be I wouldn't be happy if it slows down, so we would just have to keep more count. Really excited stuff and congrats on the GAAP EPS. Thank you. Our next question is from Jason Copeland with Bank of America. Please proceed.

Well, thank you guys.

I know Max, you said at the outset, the numbers kind speak for themselves, which they do. So I'm curious, like with things are going well on credit, and funding and volume growth and profitability, really what are the one or two biggest items that you're spending the bulk of your time focusing on driving improvement That list is long. You can give me more than one or two, I was trying to prioritize.

Let's see.

I mean, we're ultimately live and die by conversion and uptake.

And up to a point, you can do this by having blanket sort of great terms and more 0% at some point you have to personalize where it's not enough to say to someone your purchasing power increased, you have to speak to your purchasing power at a particular merchant is waiting for you, etcetera. And so there's always opportunity to find that a [indiscernible] of offering someone access to credit without overextending them.

One thing that again, I'm sure I'm repeating myself at this point, but we're not in the business of making consumer spend more money In fact, we're in a business of [indiscernible] helping consumers pay less for access to credit but we are more than excited to take over more of our consumer spend. In the last letter, I think I said that we want to get the card to 20,000,000 cardholders averaging $7,500 per year of spend those are somewhat arbitrary numbers, they're just they multiply out to a big number and we're hoping to get bigger and bigger. So anything we can do to personalize the experience to give people a chance to feel like this is the best alternative they have to their debit or their credit card is what we're busy with. In The U. S. Internationally, obviously, there's more than a little to do In The U. K, we are doing well there.

They're There's lots to do, but [indiscernible] really [indiscernible] pleased but not satisfied, I think it's the internal terminology I used. Etcetera. So I think that those are kind of the maybe things that are top of mind. Any given time, there's always something exciting going on here. There's Definitely some pretty fascinating things happening just answered Ray's question was GenAI that I spent a little bit of my time on Again, not in the service of anything we have set out to do build good financial products. So there's just a lot to build in new product categories.

Right.

And maybe just a follow-up on card. I mean, now it's up to 8% or just over 8% of total GMV.

I'm wondering if you've seen any change in consumer behavior with the products in terms of paying out versus pay later or any newer merchant categories that you're seeing increased traction in terms of usage of the card?

No, we have not, but we're very actively working on the card is really great for some of the transactions that it covers today and it's not optimal at all or not as good as it should be anyway for other kinds. And so [indiscernible] a meaningful amount of my time trying to answer the question of how do we get to that $7,500 per user?

And obviously, there's only so many couches and bicycles you're going to buy per year. There's a lot of other kinds of transactions.

And so everything we do here is in the service for the card in particular of product that doesn't charge you late fees, doesn't compound all the good things we do, doesn't charge you any interest at all if the merchant is interested in getting you to say yes. And so one way to answer this question is how can we be useful to you in groceries? How can we be useful to you when you're buying medicine? And though we just launched with GoodRx, and it's in the letter I think And that's a category that we really think is very important, helping people buy what is a progressively more expensive part of their life medication something that we're quite proud about and excited to more. And so each one of these categories something that you have to think through and the modalities of purchase can be different.

What it looks like to use a Affirm card at a a restaurant versus a general merchandise store or versus a specialty electronics store.

So those are the areas of possible impact and we are seeing at this point, the card is big enough where we can observe usage bind areas where conversion is not as high as it is in other and ask ourselves what can we do to improve the experience. That's actually probably one of the areas that I'm most excited about and spending a lot of my time on. Trying to anticipate How can we improve conversion, improve [indiscernible] in places where it's not as high as it can be. [indiscernible] Our next question is from Vincent Cantac with BTIG. Please proceed.

Hey, good afternoon. Thanks for taking my questions.

Max, you spoke earlier about taking share in The U. S. This quarter.

And I think it's interesting when I contrast a firm strong growth and your RLP margin versus some of the credit cards for instance that I cover providing maybe weaker 2025 guidance on GMV and calling tighter credit underwriting I'm wondering what you are seeing in terms of being able to capture maybe even more share through the course of 2020 are you seeing opportunities with merchants and maybe different behaviors from customers as these other lenders pull back?

And what are you expecting? How will this play out over the course calendar 2025?

Definitely not the easiest thing I will to predict. Right? These things are A little bit They're both slow moving and quite dynamic. Especially as seen through the lens of like credit reporting Obviously, any time [indiscernible] in a credit card space at least as often related to their forward looking view as it is about them dealing with mistakes of their past.

So anytime somebody offers you conservative guidance on credit issuance, they may be speaking about their overall view of the [indiscernible] But as often as not, they're also speaking to the fact that they overextended that consumer in their portfolio and are now dealing with having to average into reasonable yield and loss rates. Because of how our product works, we have much less of a concern in that damage. We underwrite every transaction, typical term is much shorter. We get to assess the consumer's financial health in the moment and do our best to help them. But if we think that they're overextending themselves, the answer can't be sure, just put it all into the big bucket and revolve away. So because we have the discipline and we try to extend it to our [indiscernible] it's a lot easier for us to feel good about the state of the consumer given our numbers, we're not apologizing for mistakes in the past because the past is looking So I do think that as if reports and the forecast to be believed Some of these lenders will pull back and we'll be there to help these customers because we should be.

It's our job.

Again, if I sound like I'm hesitating, it's not that I don't have the but it's always very difficult to figure out what's going to happen next and [indiscernible] picked this business and this structure of our product specifically so that we can react very quickly to whatever macroeconomic wins might bring Right now, U. S. Consumers really healthy. They're shopping They are paying their loans back.

The economy is basically fully employed, which is really solid. We're not afraid of hire for longer because able to operate at these rates quite successfully. [indiscernible] everything looks good. We'll continue lending because seems like a really good business decision for us.

Should things change, we will be there to pull back smartly. We don't grow based on credit. We issue credit based on our needs to print healthy credit results for our capital partners.

Okay, great. That's very helpful. Thank you. And actually a follow-up on that. You said for instance, you're not afraid of hire for longer.

It seems like every day we get some new macro or political news to think about. Whether it's the CFPB director departure or tariffs or interest rates were higher for longer Wanted to get your thoughts on maybe what's important and impactful to Affirm from what's coming out of Washington?

I think we are sufficiently self aware to know that we are on the receiving end of what's coming out of Washington So our job is to help consumers buy and merchant sell and pretty good at that job. The rates don't phase us. And again, I think we've shown that we we will thrive just about any rate environment we've seen so far.

Regulatorially, we have not [indiscernible] back nor do we expect to do something new and unnatural based on the administration because we are guided by a mission and a sense of right and wrong that's internal to who we are.

Versus to what's on the latest headlines and we'll continue lending we'll continue not charging late fees and not compounding interest and raging against deferred interest and things like that. And so none of that is going to change there's absolutely no need to for us to reexamine any of our core values. Things like tariffs are super hard to predict. [indiscernible] tend to have inflationary [indiscernible] on the economy and when inflation was raging, we were there to help our customers afford things that they needed to buy. And we'll continue to be there for them. Etcetera. So I think if I and I don't mean to sound overly hanguine because every day is a new day and we keep our eyes and [indiscernible] on the dials and hands Affirm in the steering wheel, but we lend in Democratic and Republican administrations in red and blue states all the time and sort of No.

No plans to change any of that.

Okay.

Very helpful. Thanks very much.

Our next question is from John Hetze with Jefferies. Please proceed.

Afternoon, guys. Congratulations and thanks for taking my questions. You did talk about some of the goals within the card segment and but I guess what I'm wondering is what have you learned so far when it comes to customer interaction and kind of overall RevPAR per customer when it comes to that product layered upon the buy now pay later's products that might have brought them into the network.

So I think I said it before and It's bears repeating Card is not in and of itself a booster to our usage. It's a filter in a sense that people that will eventually become our best consumers, people that really buy into the value proposition of Affirm Affirm% the deals, the discounted APRs, the no fees, like everything we stand for if you opt into the card you're leaning into a firm and choosing to become essentially we think is going to be a lifetime relationship. And so the card is this, do you want to embrace Affirm fully? Here it is, please go for it. And so I don't think it's for everyone, but it is our best customers choosing to do more good news is that we have we see no shortage of those and maybe eventually it'll be just all of our customers but or consumers. But that's an important thing. So as we look at the card stats, they're all staggeringly strong. It's our best economics. It's our best margin, it's our best engagement, it's our best [indiscernible] per year. So all of that is really strong. But it's also not a surprise. It's not like like, oh, we discovered that these card people are amazing.

They were already on track to be our best customers. Now they're just becoming our best customers that much faster. So I think that's an important background to understand about that consumer.

We are leaning in very heavily into making sure that they never regret their choice. There will be more and more things to like about the card program We have other variants of products that are available in a carton mind. We think we have another type of program to offer types of program to offer to folks that are slightly different than today's consumer that takes up the card. So the journey is beginning. There's many more things to build. But generally speaking, these are the best consumers We didn't necessarily know we have them as soon as they take up the card, we know they're here a long time and we're excited to serve them.

Okay. That's very good context and helpful. Second question, related to expense. You scaled a ton on expenses in the past year, especially the tech side and the G and A side. And now margins are better than I think anybody would have expected. How do we think about a trajectory of scaling in the next few quarters given the fact that margins are better, so you have an opportunity to reinvest maybe in some longer term growth initiatives. I guess just a question of how we think about the trajectory of that scale Yes. Thanks for the question, John.

We have made investments, of course, to support launches like The U. K, for example. And so typically what you'll find with a firm is that the work that goes into getting a product or a program live happens several quarters before that product reaches public availability. So that was definitely the case with The UK I feel like we've done a really good job of investing ahead of these programs to make sure that we maintain really healthy growth rates in the medium and long term I would also just say, I mean, I put you to a couple of things. I mean, the guide that we gave both for Q3 and Q4, you can see the implied non GAAP operating expenses, they're pretty consistent with the level of spend that we had in the second quarter. So in terms of the trajectory going forward, we do expect it to be relatively flat from the Q2 levels.

There is a portion of our fixed operating expenses that is variable with transactions and or GMV, just sort of general activity in the business. So, I think it does make sense that some of the operating expenses will scale a bit with GMV growth. So those are good spend. We're happy to spend a bit more as the business grows to support customers and to make sure all of our infrastructure for the sites and for our merchants is up and So yes, that's how we're thinking about it.

Okay. Thanks very much.

Our next question is from Andrew Jeffrey with William Blair. Please proceed.

Good afternoon. Appreciate you taking all the good questions.

I wanted to ask a little bit about durability of the funding cost improvements you're seeing? Obviously, it's a good environment and you've made comments comments and demonstrated Affirm's ability to improve loan sale execution and overall funding costs.

How much do you think what we're seeing today is structural? In other words, what would carry through the next consumer recession or economic recession? How much is sort of cyclical sort of a sign of where we are are currently in the economy? [indiscernible] humbly, we're definitely the beneficiaries of the market. Conditions. And so definitely can't We can't ignore that the environment is very favorable for what we do. But we do think we're differentiated. We think that the performance that we've been able to demonstrate On credit, has really changed the both the tone and depth of conversations with all stripes of capital partners and we think that's very durable. The commitment we've made to our investors, both debt and equity, around our focused execution on credit and our commitment to deliver against those commitments And job number one, as Max always says, That commitment and the results that it generates that's who we are, it's how we're going to operate, through any cycle, any macro volatility. And what you're seeing right now is Is that kind of credit for the results that we're delivering with the favorable market conditions resulting in just really excellent conditions for us execution wise.

And so it is the case that we're beneficiaries, but I don't want to be dismissive of the advantages that we get because of of the good work and we think that's pretty durable. For this work that we'll note specifically in our fiscal Q2 we do benefit a little bit in terms of the average funding cost numbers that we show our materials just from the timing of some originations. And so I don't I don't I wouldn't expect the calculation as we do it there to be the same in the future quarters, but really the fundamental trends, ignoring just kind of the math in the quarter, fundamental trends are very real and think we can continue to to sustain those. We get a question a lot about how much is actually just truly rate driven and I think we're not seeing any of the impact of rates right now. And the business. And I think it's much more about spreads and credit execution in the overall capability of the asset.

All right. That's super helpful. And then Max, if I could ask one on your your baby on the Affirm card, which is performing very well. I appreciate the the comments on efforts to expand use cases. And can you talk about sort of as a percentage, I know it's still early, but as a percentage of those 1,700,000 cardholders or so, how many of those are sort of primary banking relationships for a Affirm, I guess as measured by direct deposit? I'm trying to get a sense of kind of what the lift is potentially there to Not many right now.

I guess good news, bad news, I'm not sure which one you're looking for, but there's plenty of room to add to the services we offer to the consumer because majority of them do not really have a Depository relationship with us. We're not a bank. We're not [indiscernible] busy or engaged in gathering deposits from the consumers. That said, the ones that are willing to trust us with some of their money especially in a form of direct deposit, benefit from us understanding their total financial state that much better and their ability to borrow goes up. So it's a natural Thing we do where we we'll take your money if you'd like to deposit it with us and we'll understand you that much better and we'll be able to expand your access to credit with that understanding. There's definitely more to do there and we're a little bit remiss in updating the Street on the progress we're doing there, but that's going to change.

The next few quarters.

Okay. Appreciate it. Thank you.

Our next question is from Timothy Chiodo with UBS. Please proceed.

Great. Thanks for taking the question. Optin investors look at the list of really, really strong partners that you have, obviously Apple Amazon, Shopify, Walmart, Expedia, it really doesn't get much better than that. And there's this question of who could be next and often the answer is, it's more the international opportunity with many of those large enterprise partners and customers. And I realize you're likely not able to discuss your constructive discussions that you might be having with some of them. But if you could maybe just some context around that opportunity in terms of there are any limiting factors, if there's any maybe exclusive agreements or anything else that would preclude you from longer term being able to go outside The U. S. With many of those in addition to the start you already have with Shopify.

I am sure I cannot speak to exact contracts and such. Just because these things are understandably frequently confidential. The short answer is I don't think this is [indiscernible] it is currently a target rich environment.

To use a military term. I think we have lots of opportunity internationally, but also domestically we're still not at 100% of e commerce and we aspire to get to dangerously close to that number. And we are on precious few offline checkouts and we certainly aspire to be a meaningful player in both Obviously, the card consumers benefit from a firm online and offline because the card works just about anywhere Visa accepted. But there's more we can do there and we will Internationally, the pipelines of our sales team are are currently quite well filled and we feel very good about a lot of the conversations we Yes. And maybe I'd add a small thing. I don't think we think there's anything that limits our [indiscernible] And as much as we have really good relationships and do something really unique [indiscernible] the reality is we're today really only live and just barely so in The UK and there's lots of other geographies that they our partners are talking to us about going into. We have to get there, we have to get live, we have to prove that we can deliver the same experience we do in The U. S. But I would answer your question directly that there is no limiting factor on our ability to scale with with those kind of partners everywhere.

Perfect. Thank you for both of us. Appreciate it.

Our next question is from Jamie Friedman with Susquehanna. Please proceed.

Hi. Did you share what percentage of the GMV is now made up off offline like face to face? I don't think we break that out. Okay. So maybe we'll wait for that for a future time. I wanted to ask about market share. So periodically though you you do max share your own observations about market share. I think you shared one six months ago. Do you have that number now? And if not, maybe qualitatively, if you could talk to how you saw a market share shift in the quarter? Yes, why don't I grab that one?

We don't we did not break it out quantitatively. Do share our estimates from time to time. As you probably know, it's It's a bit of difficult number to pin down.

And that being said, we do believe we're taking share this market. We think we are the fastest growing of all of our large competitors. We think that we had real traction versus the competitors who break down break out their North American businesses where we were able to grow much more quickly with them. I think it's a function of number of factors, but not the least of which is is something I think Tim alluded to, which is when you partner with the best who have good holiday periods, You are the beneficiary of that in terms of market share and our distribution really did help us quite a bit last quarter and I think stand out versus our competition in North America.

Our next question is from James Faucette with Morgan Stanley. Please proceed.

Great. Thank you so much. I wanted to ask quickly and I appreciate you guys have answered a lot already. Owing to your approach to these calls, so appreciate that. Looking at the delinquency improvement in December, that seems to be seasonal and you expect to get some continued benefit through the tax return season, early that would also be typical. You've also been clear that you intend to increase risk exposure at least some, but how should we be thinking about your target high watermark for like a KPI like delinquency rate how much incremental GMV you think you can unlock along the way to whatever that target is?

So probably bears to start by saying the targets we look at internally for delinquencies etcetera.

Are more than anything about Our capital [indiscernible] We understand what our partners require of us to feel good There are always two numbers, right? There's yield by IFRS or for them doesn't matter. And then there's delinquencies and defaults that is a signal of safety and certainty. And both those numbers are fundamentally determined by us and our partners in concert and in constant ever in terms of, hey, let's take a little bit more risk and grow a bit more. The risk we take is determined by those conversations. The settings are very clear.

The conversations are entirely in the context of credit frankly, because our capital partners just don't care how fast we grow. They are here for the yield and for the safety of our returns and the stability of the numbers. Full stop. They don't care if we grew 35% or 25% so long as they're able to deploy capital successfully feel great about our stewardship of their money. And so that's that entirely independently of our growth. And it's exactly how it should be. I think many a company got in trouble in the past by saying all we need to do to grow is just be a little bit looser with our credit standards. That's the first step down into the proverbial hell of bad credit management and we won't let that ever happen here.

So [indiscernible] You're totally right that there's a seasonality to credit improvements and Just you can see it in the typical supplement chart that we show as sort of the DQs fluctuate up and down as the year goes. We keep our hands on the wheel and we move that number up and down approvals up and down based on what we're seeing in the numbers, how we feel the seasonality is going, sometimes seasonality can be delayed, which is this last was a little bit weird.

In that sense, But again, like the two are separate conversations. Our growth internally is a major topic and it's entirely in the context of what merchants can we do a grade 0% program with. Where can we get into checkouts where we aren't, who can launch sooner, who wants to run a program in our app, who wants to extend a 0% deal they ran through the holidays all the way through January. Those are growth initiatives that we really love and [indiscernible] doing and pushing and selling and all that.

It is never ever in the conversation that, oh, by the way, shouldn't we get a little bit loose here with credit because that will help our growth.

Like the day that happens, I am failing at my job, Libre is failing at his, just doesn't happen. So I strongly encourage everyone to not contemplate the two in concert just because it creates a false correlation where there isn't one.

We have reached back over to Zine for closing remarks.

Well, thank you all for joining the call today. We look forward to speaking with you all again next quarter. Talk to you then.

Your lines at this time and thank you for your participation. [indiscernible]