FinTech news in affirm category

Affirm today also posted its second quarter results for the 2023 fiscal year. GMV (gross merchandise volume) of $5.7 billion set a new record but still fell short of an outlook that Affirm itself had provided in November.

Silvija Martincevic, former chief commercial officer of Affirm, one of the U.S. biggest buy now, pay later startups, is leaving to become CEO of shift work management platform Deputy. Her work at Deputy will continue the theme, since shift workers deal with more complex scheduling and payment calculations and their employers need to comply with labor regulations like Fair Workweek rules. As part of her work at Affirm, Martincevic oversaw sales and strategic partnerships, growing the number of merchants that offer Affirm as a payment option from about 5,000 to more than 200,000 and onboarding companies like Walmart, Shopify and Amazon. Before joining Affirm in 2019, Martincevic led Groupon’s international business in Europe, Asia and Australia as chief operating officer and chief marketing officer.

While Apple has partnered with payment providers and others on the financial side of things before in order to make Apple Pay and Wallet work, Pay Later represents the first time the company is handling the actual loans, risk management, and credit checks itself.

Apple is also getting into the game, it announced today, with a service called Apple Pay Later. So we did get to see Apple’s event impact a stock, just not the one that we expected it to; investors are paying attention, at least somewhat.

Affirm — which was founded by PayPal co-founder Max Levchin — has built technology that can underwrite individual transactions, and once determining a customer is eligible offer them the option to pay on a biweekly or monthly basis. Some customers are in fact charged interest but Affirm says it doesn’t charge late fees and that there are no surprises with the amount of interest it charges. In an interview earlier this year, Libor Michalek, Affirm’s president of technology emphasized the company’s efforts to be transparent.

Walnut works with healthcare providers so that a patient’s bill can be paid back through $100-a-month increments for 30 months, instead of one aggressive credit card swipe Many BNPL startups, Walnut included, do cash-flow underwriting, in which the company connects to users’ bank accounts to see daily income, spending patterns and savings to see if a loan will likely get repaid by the end of month.

The company decided to develop secured loans for products that enable borrowers to improve their income — like motorcycles, cars and trucks — and unlike their competitors providing used vehicles, Canals said Migrante offers new vehicles.