Affirm CEO Max Levchin Talks Ambitious Path - podcast episode cover

Affirm CEO Max Levchin Talks Ambitious Path

May 13, 20265 min
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Episode description

Affirm's CEO Max Levchin joined Bloomberg's Caroline Hyde and Ed Ludlow to discuss the company's strategic vision and growth prospects during the 2026 investor forum in New York. Highlighting recent announcements on agentic commerce and international expansion, Levchin emphasized that all key initiatives are aligning to drive significant growth. The fintech firm aims to reach $100 billion in annual transaction volume, building on strong momentum including a 33% year-over-year revenue increase to over $1 billion in the third quarter. Levchin shared insights on the factors fueling this growth and the company's roadmap to scale its business globally.

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Transcript

Speaker 1

Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news. There's been plenty of announcements coming out about Agentic commerce and international expansion from a firm it's just been reporting yesterday at the company's twenty twenty six investor forum, the fintech company is laying out a bold roadmap to one hundred million dollars in

annual volume. Look, CEO Max left and plans to say, joins us in New York and I'm sad I'm not their next to you, Max, but tell us about what you're in a I know too far, but I'm interested in what you told the investors, the analyst community in New York yesterday and for the next few days. How do you get to that sort of volume? Where are the growth factors?

Speaker 2

You know? The exciting thing is that literally everything we have been working towards is coming together and working incredibly well. We held a similar event three years ago and promised investors will get to fifty billion dollars of gross merchandise volume, our merchant sales that we power, and we will do so by maintaining while maintaining our profit margins within three and four percent, will grow at twenty percent per year or so that that was the story we told them

three years ago. We've now come back. We're now basically that fifty billion dollar mark. You would expect us to slow down, but instead we told our investor based yesterday, we expect to grow twenty five percent compounding, so five points extra, and we intend to up the floor of our profitability from three to three point seventy five percent.

So not only are we growing faster, not only are we reaching more consumers, more merchants, we intend to do this more profitably, and we feel it's just getting better and better for us. So that that's the that's the headline. And you know, I had a lot of conversations yesterday that seem to indicate that our investor is quite enjoying the news.

Speaker 3

Mac Max just very simply, why is a one hundred billion dollar volume target the right target? The right metric? When people try and understand a firm like you come the show often and we talk about the different offerings and some of the newer products that you're doing, this kind of north star or achievable goal. Probably to your mind, it's really interesting that you've set that as it you know.

Speaker 2

It is just a waypoint we have absolutely no intention of slowing down or stopping at one hundred is just another nice round number that we can set our sites to. But we do see an incredible market pull consumers already, they are coming to us. We are now seeing inbounds from consumers that have didn't discover us at the point of sale, which is the usual way, just signing up for firm, asking us to send them a card so they can transact everywhere. That's been a huge poll that's

contributed to our growth tremendously. Merchants come to us saying I've seen your logo on my competitor sites. I know you're driving ten twenty percent more sales for them. You should do the same for us. Let us sign up, you should promote our sales events, tell us merchants in your app, because we're now reaching fifteen million monthly consumers

and so on. So just the tremendous amount of we're finally a real scalable thing that every constitution cares about a lot is what gives us the confidence to go towards this new mouthstone and.

Speaker 1

Amos liked it, like obviously talking about the pending Industrial Bank chat, so that could be another strength area than the fact that you've got competitive advantage. But take us to the future and the agentic commerce and future. Because we talk about a lot on the show and you are already doing deals with Google. What does that look like in terms of how I'm going to be having a relationship with a firm going forward.

Speaker 2

I think it's going to be incredible. I cannot be more excited about this new AI powered future in many different pathsts as an engineer, as a coder, I love what we have today. As a consumer, as a buyer of complicated things, I love the help that AI provides me when I research the finer points of you know, whatever it is that I'm the matter now. A firm is a great tool of buying things that are meaningful that when it matters, that's when consumers come to us.

They want anything from a bicycle to a couch to an espresso machine. During those moments, you want to know that the financing choice you're making has your back, that you're not going to get hit with some unexpected fees. You know exactly when you're going to start and stop with your payments. That's what we've built and agents just make it that much easier to bring to the end consumer and the brand we've built allows people to trust us.

The fact that we're able to partner with LM providers allows us to be right there when consumers are searching and doing the research. So it's just an incredible incremental growth engine that we found.

Speaker 3

Max here again emphasizing the word built. You do that often. But how does quickly, Max left Chin think about M and A in a firm's future.

Speaker 2

You know, we've looked for years. We haven't found anything in the last few so never say never. But we have so much to do just with a team that we have. It's you know, when opportunities to come up, well, of course, look at them, but we're very focused on building affirms.

Speaker 3

Here, Max Leftchin back on bloom Bag Tech. Thank you very much for your time.

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