Max Levchin
Analyst · James Faucette with Morgan Stanley
That's a great question. I'll start this time and Rob can speak to the exact Pay-in-X growth, which is pretty good this quarter. So kind of the most important things to understand is free use of money is valuable to all consumers. So you can sort of ask like what is Affirm for? And one version of the answer is it's for people trying to figure out how to fit a considered purchase, something that actually registers on their personal financial radar into their monthly outflows. So it's affordability, it's access to capital when they need it or access to credit when they need it. The kind of a baseline answer. A more sophisticated answer is there's always alternatives in that space. And so the question then becomes, well, what's the cost of money? What's the cost of it? And obviously, the cost is interest we charge and the best possible deal is, well, what if there was no interest at all? What if someone else paid your interest. And -- that is a really, really important function in part because that makes the product appealing across all credit spectrum. So you could argue that there's a natural point where you say, well, you know what, I have excess of cash. I just don't care. And if you're going to charge me interest, I'm going to pay cash and move on. I'm going to pay with my credit card and pay it off before the end of the month, so there's no interest at all. The second you enter a space of very low interest like demonstrably lower than your credit card APR or 0, which is everyone's favorite price, you end up in a place where even a super prime borrower would benefit from free use of money. And the longer term is the loan, the more obvious the benefit. So every one of these Pay-in-X type products, it's a version of access to money at no cost to the consumer, we're always looking for ways of funding those transactions by the hands of our partners because they are the primary beneficiaries of these transactions. So it extends from merchants to manufacturers, to brands, sometimes to marketing partners to platform partners. So there's plenty of people who are involved in a transaction that have a degree of margin and have a differing level of excitement to see that transaction go through. The most exciting ones are, of course, merchants because they're dealing with things like inventory management, they have discounts, they rather not make, but they do want to see inventory move. But there's also people in manufacturing and the original equipment manufacturers in particular, that have a predictable upgrade cycle that they're trying to stick to. And they will be very excited a year from launch to push their last year's innovations and the new ones can go forth. And so all of that adds up to ample opportunity to create more of these Pay-in-X and pay-over-time transactions with 0. And I particularly like the longer-term ones because that's where underwriting at 0% consumer interest is a really, really hard science. Like this is the kind of thing where if you screw it up a little bit, you'll make a lot of unprofitable transactions. Part of our longevity in the space and our competitive strength has been our ability to precisely price these things, both on the credit side and the profitability side, the capital markets lens. It's very, very hard to do write unless you're very good and very confident in both your underwriting and your control of your underwriting. So that's kind of why these transactions keep showing up. That's why we do things like the Big Nothing. That's why we do a lot of these promotions in various forms of Pay-in-X. That's why you see growth of various Pay-in-X tractions. And you should expect to continue to see more of these. They're all building a giant book of -- this is proof that you, your favorite the manufacturers, the retailers, all the participants should participate in these because even though they tap into your margin a little bit, they drive the kind of buyer that has a lot of choices, and this is their favorite choice.