Affirm Holdings, Inc. (AFRM)

Affirm, founded in 2012, operates a technology-driven payment network offering consumer point-of-sale financing and merchant commerce solutions built on principles of transparency and honest pricing, charging $0 late fees since inception. The company's core products include Pay-in-X (short-term 0% APR installment plans), 0% APR monthly installment loans, and interest-bearing monthly installment loans, which for fiscal year 2025 represented 14%, 13%, and 72% of total gross merchandise volume (GMV), respectively, out of $36.7 billion in total GMV facilitated. Affirm also offers the Affirm Card, a debit card enabling pay-in-full or pay-over-time functionality, virtual one-time-use cards, and an FDIC-insured Affirm Money Account through partner Cross River Bank.

As of June 30, 2025, the company served approximately 377 thousand active merchants across diverse industries including electronics, fashion, travel, and general merchandise, with 94% of transactions in fiscal 2025 driven by repeat consumers and approximately 5.8 transactions per active consumer (up 20% year-over-year). Affirm generates revenue primarily through merchant fees for facilitating sales and interest income on loans originated or purchased from originating bank partners, with additional revenue from interchange fees shared by card-issuing partners. The company's competitive advantages include strong network effects, proprietary machine-learning-based risk models trained on data from approximately 343 million loans, in-house technology infrastructure, and diversified capital markets access spanning warehouse credit facilities, securitizations, and loan sale arrangements with institutions including depository banks, investment banks, and asset managers.

Affirm competes against legacy credit/debit card issuers (Synchrony, JPMorgan Chase, Citibank, Bank of America, Capital One, Bread Financial, American Express), payment networks (Visa, Mastercard), mobile wallets (PayPal), and other buy-now-pay-later providers (Block, Klarna), many of which possess greater scale and resources. The company's growth strategy centers on expanding merchant and consumer solutions, increasing transaction frequency and in-store usage (particularly via Affirm Card), broadening consumer and merchant reach, and international expansion beyond its current markets of the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom into Western Europe and Australia. The business experiences seasonality, with GMV peaking in the fiscal second quarter (holiday season) and lowest delinquencies in fiscal Q3 and Q4.

As of June 30, 2025, Affirm employed 2,206 people, primarily in the United States, with no unionized workforce and no history of work stoppages.