Max Levchin, co-founder and CEO of buy-now-pay-later lender Affirm, laid out an ambitious roadmap at the company’s 2026 Investor Forum: a path to $100 billion in annual transaction volume, built around expanding into agentic commerce — AI-driven shopping and payment flows — and further international expansion beyond Affirm’s core U.S. market. The company backed up the ambition with strong recent results, reporting gross merchandise volume up 35% and revenue up 33% year-over-year to over $1 billion in a recent quarter, and raising its full-year financial forecast as a result.
Levchin has been publicly bullish on the resilience of the American consumer throughout 2026, telling media outlets that despite broader economic concerns, Affirm continues to see healthy shopping activity and strong loan repayment trends among its users. In a late-July interview with Semafor, Levchin described his vision for Affirm’s role in a customer’s financial life in unusually personal terms, saying he wants the product to function like a “smarter older sister” — someone who is honest with you about money rather than either overly permissive or unnecessarily restrictive.
A Deliberately Different Lending Model
Levchin has structured Affirm’s core lending model around two features he presents as fundamentally different from typical credit card economics: the company does not charge late fees, and it does not use compound interest on its loans. Levchin’s stated rationale is that being fully transparent with customers about the total cost of a loan upfront — rather than relying on penalty fees or compounding interest that can obscure the true cost of borrowing over time — is central to how he wants the business to operate, a positioning meant to differentiate Affirm from both traditional credit cards and less transparent buy-now-pay-later competitors.
Levchin co-founded PayPal in 1998 alongside Peter Thiel and others, as part of the group of early PayPal employees and founders that later became informally known in tech industry circles as the “PayPal Mafia” — a group that also included Elon Musk and went on to found or fund a wide range of subsequent technology companies. Levchin founded Affirm in 2012, explicitly building it as an alternative to what he viewed as a credit card industry structured around fees and compounding interest that could trap consumers in escalating debt.
Agentic Commerce as the Next Growth Frontier
The 2026 Investor Forum’s emphasis on “agentic commerce” reflects a broader industry bet that AI shopping assistants and automated purchasing agents will increasingly handle transactions on behalf of consumers, and that payment and lending products need to be built to plug directly into those automated flows rather than assuming every purchase decision involves a human manually completing a checkout process. Affirm’s roadmap treats this shift as a genuine new growth category rather than a incremental feature, alongside its continued international expansion plans.
A Business Model Built Around a Different Revenue Source
Because Affirm does not charge late fees or compound interest to consumers, the company’s revenue instead comes primarily from merchant fees paid by retailers who offer Affirm’s installment financing at checkout, alongside interest charged transparently and disclosed upfront on longer-term loans. That structure means Affirm’s growth is closely tied to expanding merchant partnerships and transaction volume across a widening set of retail categories, rather than depending on consumer penalty fees the way some competing lenders and credit card issuers do — a distinction Levchin has consistently emphasized as central to differentiating Affirm’s brand from the broader buy-now-pay-later category, which has faced growing regulatory scrutiny in several markets over consumer debt risk.
Affirm went public in 2021 and has since expanded well beyond its original point-of-sale retail financing product into a broader personal finance platform, including a debit card product that lets users apply installment financing to everyday purchases rather than only larger retail transactions. Levchin has remained personally active in the payments and fintech ecosystem beyond Affirm as well, having also co-founded fraud-detection company Sift and continuing to serve on the boards of several other technology companies, giving him a broad, ongoing vantage point across consumer fintech trends beyond his primary role running Affirm.
Levchin has also spoken publicly about designing Affirm’s underwriting model to evaluate each individual purchase on its own merits rather than issuing a single revolving credit line the way traditional credit cards do, a structural choice he argues reduces the risk of a borrower quietly accumulating debt across many small transactions without a clear, itemized view of what they owe and why.
What This Means for Philippine Founders
Buy-now-pay-later products have grown rapidly in the Philippines through local players like BillEase and Atome, and both the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas and the Securities and Exchange Commission have signaled increasing regulatory attention toward consumer lending transparency in this space. Levchin’s no-late-fee, no-compound-interest model offers a concrete, tested reference point for Filipino fintech founders designing BNPL or short-term consumer credit products aimed at the country’s large underbanked population, particularly given how directly transparent fee structures address the kind of consumer protection concerns Philippine regulators have already flagged as priorities.
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