'DOING GREAT': Affirm CEO says consumers remain financially healthy

You know, the Affirm consumer is doing great. One of the things that's unique about us specifically is we underwrite every single transaction, as you said, the moment it happens and reserve the right to say, you know what? You're overextended, the answer is, sadly, no. Perhaps make a down payment, save up, choose a lower priced item. But we act as a financial steward of your wallet's health. And that gives us a great view into what's in demand, what's rising, what's falling. We saw this huge demand for ticketing. I think summer concerts are going to be quite good. But we get to see your true state of financial reality at the moment of your application for credit. And if you're healthy, we will actually be there for you, and if you're not, we'll be honest and say, hey, please think twice. So as a result, our delinquencies are steady and great, our demand is strong.

So the very sort of simple way of looking at Affirm, our consumer, what we call our consumer and kind of where we live in that K, as you put it, we care the most about employment data. The reason I'm so confident in Affirm U.S. consumer being quite healthy is because the employment is still there and very full. It's very hard for us to write you a loan if we think you don't have a steady sort of income to pay us back. In fact, the answer for most of those consumers, unfortunately, is no. So when we underwrite you, we have a very good idea that you are actually able to repay the stream you're signing up for. So in the part of the economy where consumers are well employed, by far the biggest part of the economy, those consumers are doing great. They're choosing carefully where they're going to go with their financial decisions. But generally speaking, they do great managing their money. And we're there to help it.

So we just wrapped up our big Nothing Days, which is an event we host a couple times a year where many, many retailers sign up to offer 0% -- basically, they pay your interest. Whether you're selling electronics or concert tickets, a merchant who wants to promote their particular sale pays the interest. So you as a consumer pay nothing at all. It's just a 0% loan. And one of the things we saw, the reason I'm confident in my summer predictions is we saw a 67% jump in demand for concert tickets. I am no expert in concerts, so I don't know which one's going to be great, but I suspect it's going to be well distributed.

I like to joke that we are an A.I. story, overnight headline 15 years in the making. We use A.I. in all kinds of different ways and places, so I'll try to cover them quickly. Company's 15 years old. We founded the company on this idea that you can use A.I., machine learning more specifically, to create better credit outcomes if we were just to be allowed to underwrite every transaction. That's exactly what we did, doing almost $50 billion of GMV, growing 30% plus year-over-year because there's so much demand for this kind of credit. Made possible by some very sophisticated machine learning that we built proprietary internally here and continue to innovate on. In addition to it, we're huge beneficiaries of all amazing new tools, you know, the things we talk about, Anthropic, Claude, we tried them all very early on, we adopted the ones that fit our business. We see great productivity growth. We have incredible number of just engineering productivity that we see gaining from the beginning of this year when we started really investing in this thing. So that's another huge area of A.I. that we're very excited about. Finally, A.I. is coming to consumers. Not engineers, not designers, but just those that use these chatbots to pick items to buy, to shop for things, to compare prices. It's very important for our flavor of financial products, we pride ourselves on transparency and sense of control over consumers to be able to be available to you as you shop through these chatbots. That's why we're partnering to make ourselves available right inside that chat as you sort of pick the thing or maybe the A.I. helps you pick the thing you want to buy. The next question is how are you going to pay for it, and the chatbot will seamlessly talk to us in the background, and you're pre-approved for up to, let's say, $5,000, and the retailer will pay your interest if you're approved. No fees, no compounding. So that's another area where we work with A.I.