‘The US consumer is alive and well’ – Affirm CEO says market turbulence is not impacting business

Affirm Holdings Chairman and CEO Max Levchin told CNBC that despite the poor market performance this year, US consumers – and Affirm customers – are spending wisely.

“The American consumer is alive and well. Go shopping, buy, pay off loans, at least to confirm well enough. In general, everything is going according to plan, there are no shocks in the stock markets. seems to be making a real impact on our core business, which is doing very, very well,” Levchin said in an interview Thursday night on Mad Money.

Shares of Affirm rose more than 20% to about $22.50 on Friday, a day after the lender’s buy-now-pay-later quarterly earnings report showed smaller-than-expected losses. Affirm also exceeded expectations and said it is expanding its partnership with Shopify.

“We’ve been the partner of choice, if you will, for all of these really, really great companies that are fueling American e-commerce, and we’ve succeeded at that. Hence all our growth, however, we also have a fantastically well-developed program … self-service shopping,” said Levchin, noting that Affirm also has partnerships with Walmart and Amazon.

Affirm opened on Friday at about $25 a share. But that’s still 85% down from the all-time high of $176.65 in November.

Affirm has yet to release its full FY 2023 or full-year guidance. The company plans to present these figures in the company’s next income statement.

However, Levchin, the founder of Affirm, is optimistic about the company’s growth prospects.

“Some of our competitors have only recently published their 15% annual growth rate, some of them are not published, so I really don’t know. high-quality income, really good economy of the year,” he said. “Everyone should switch to buy now and pay later.”