Affirm’s CRO on partnerships, growth, and product

Buy now, pay later contender Affirm is riding high after its latest earnings report showed strong growth in the competitive market.

The company saw a 34% revenue increase to $933 million, with gross merchandise volume (GMV), the total dollar amount of all transactions on the Affirm platform, growing 42% YoY to a record $10.8 billion. Notably, it also reported a net income of $81 million.

Affirm’s CRO Wayne Pommen took a victory lap with Revenue Brew as he spoke about what worked well with the company’s revenue strategy and his focus for 2026.

After an earnings report that outlined evidence of success for the way that Affirm is building revenue strategy, how do you go about identifying what’s working well and what can be improved?

We feel like we’re firing on all cylinders. The growth of the merchant network, the growth of the user network, the increasing frequency of use by the users all working together to drive really strong GMV growth, and following on from that, revenue growth, margin growth, and profitability.

How important have partnerships with the likes of Amazon, Costco, and Shopify been to the way you have thought about building growth strategy so far?

It’s really critical to how the business works. You can see in our results that about three-quarters of our transactions still come through a point of sale, as opposed to direct to the consumer. In other words, those are all through partnerships, be they partnerships with big retailers like some of the ones you mentioned, or channel partners like Shopify or Apple Pay or Stripe.

I want to focus on the merchant network. It seemed like the growth in that aspect was critical to the growth shown in the earnings report. What’s working well there?

Some of what you’re seeing there is our increasing ability to access large numbers of smaller merchants through some of those channel partners I mentioned, like a Stripe, or an audience through Shopify. We really like those partnerships because it helps us get to that long tail of merchants at scale. So I think you’re going to see us doing more of that.

Affirm is a mission-oriented company. You have spoken about how Affirm is OK with passing on quicker revenue streams, like late fees, now in exchange for healthy revenue streams later. The earnings report showed that card users doubled. Do you feel that a stat like that validates the Affirm mission and strategy?

We’re really excited about the card growth, and that’s really fundamental to the future of the company.

We see consumers who get the card using Affirm at a far higher rate of frequency, online and offline, than customers without the card. So they sort of become our power users, and so to see that card penetration and usage growing so quickly is huge validation.

Do you think the company’s mission is an asset that could mean that potential regulation in the buy now, pay later space could actually become an advantage?

When you start from the perspective of, how are you going to deliver an honest financial product with no surprises, with alignment with the customer outcomes between the lender and the consumer, you tend to find you’re in a pretty good place in terms of not creating the problems that regulators are trying to solve.

It seems CROs are being asked to contribute more to strategy, which means their own strategy must align across the company. At Affirm, how do you create effective boundaries but also growth strategies across the C-suite?

Siloing just doesn’t work. We need to have a really tight communication and feedback loop between us, between our partners, what we’re hearing from consumers, constantly evolving the product and bringing together all of those inputs.

How do you ensure that not only executive teams are aligned, but each of the various revenue and product teams are aligned?

When it works really well, we actually have a joint revenue and product team in the room with all of our biggest partners. If we go sit with Costco or Shopify or Amazon, that’s typically a joint revenue and product effort.

It comes from having a proper mapping of the revenue and product organizations right down the org. Everyone in the revenue team who’s working on a given merchant knows who their product counterpart is for that particular domain of product and vice versa.

For critics of the BNPL space, does it feel validating to have a successful report while still remaining mission oriented?

If consumers didn’t like the experience, didn’t like how Affirm worked, we wouldn’t see them do more and more repeat purchases every quarter. Likewise, we wouldn’t see our merchant partnership numbers accelerating. To me, that’s the proof in the pudding of happy partners and happy customers.

We can absolutely stand by the design of our product and the fact that it’s in line with our mission.