Intuit, Affirm announce partnership

Buy now, pay later (BNPL) platform Affirm and fintech giant Intuit have announced a new multiyear partnership that will make Affirm the exclusive pay-over-time offering inside the QuickBooks Payments ecosystem. QuickBooks is Intuit’s accounting software arm aimed at small and mid-market businesses (SMBs).

“By partnering with Affirm to bring native, pay-over-time functionality to QuickBooks, we are giving businesses a powerful new way to increase conversion and improve cash flow,” said David Hahn, EVP and GM of Intuit’s services group, in a press release.

Intuit—which also owns TurboTax, Credit Karma, and Mailchimp—says in the coming months Affirm will become a payment method for eligible US-based businesses who invoice customers using QuickBooks Payments. The change will be integrated without any user action needed. While businesses will receive funds upfront, approved customers have the option of various payment plans (Affirm takes care of the critical underwriting process).

Critics now…users later?

The BNPL space has been expanding rapidly since Covid-19. Holding IPOs in 2021 and 2025 respectively, Affirm and Klarna’s public debuts propelled them further into the mainstream.

Despite approximately 86.5 million Americans using BNPL in 2024 (according to data from Capital One), the sector continues to attract its share of criticism, most notably because of the “phantom debt” it creates.

The regulatory landscape has also been evolving: Though the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) ruled that lenders were to be regulated like credit card issuers, the agency (under new leadership) reversed course on any enforcement action last year. A ​​CFPB study from January 2025 revealed more than one-fifth of consumers with a credit record used BNPL loans in 2022.

Last year analytics firm FICO also made waves when it announced it would start incorporating BNPL loan data into its credit score formula.

Riding the momentum

The partnership comes as Affirm continues to report positive earnings: It posted a 34% revenue increase to $933 million in fiscal Q1 (Q2 results hit on February 5). Gross merchandise volume for Affirm’s debit card, a relatively new but central component of the company’s revenue strategy, grew to $1.4 billion, a 135% increase.

Partnerships are also a growing part of Affirm’s tool kit: It extended its Amazon deal for an additional five years and expanded its lucrative global partnership with Shopify to the UK.

Competitive landscape

Affirm’s main competitors include PayPal (which launched its “Pay in Four” service in 2020), Afterpay (bought by Square, now Block, in 2021), and Klarna.

In November, Klarna topped expectations for Q3 revenue growth during its first earnings report since its long-awaited IPO. While popular in the delayed payments sector, it’s expanding into the wider digital banking space. Klarna has also been making news in the AI space, most recently joining Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) and launching a strategic AI partnership with Google Cloud in October 2025.