‘U.S. consumer is alive and well’ — Affirm CEO says market turbulence has no impact on business

Affirm Holdings Chairman and CEO Max Levchin told CNBC that despite the market’s poor performance this year, U.S. consumers – and Affirm’s customers – are spending healthily.

“The U.S. consumer is alive and well. They’re shopping, they’re buying, they’re paying their loans, at least to Affirm quite well. Generally speaking, things are going according to plan, the upheaval in stock markets does not seem to have an actual impact on our underlying business which is performing really, really well,” Levchin said in an interview on Thursday evening on “Mad Money.”

Shares of Affirm rose more than 20% to around $22.50 on Friday, the day after the buy-now, pay-later lender’s latest quarterly earnings report, which saw a smaller-than-expected loss. Affirm also beat top-line estimates and said it’s extending its partnership with Shopify.

“We’ve been the partner of choice, if you will, to all these really, really great companies that fuel the American e-commerce and we’ve done well there. That’s where all our growth comes from, that said, we also have a fantastically-well growing program … a merchant self-service,” Levchin said, noting that Affirm also has partnerships with Walmart and Amazon.

Affirm opened Friday near $25 per share. But that’s still down 85% since its all-time high of $176.65 back in November.

Affirm has not released its full fiscal year 2023 outlook or full-year guidance yet. It plans to deliver those numbers in the company’s next earnings report.

Still, Levchin, Affirm’s founder, appeared to be bullish about the company’s growth prospects.

“Some of our competitors have just recently posted their 15% annual growth rates, some of them are not public so I don’t really know. You can see from my numbers that we’re doing just fine and doing so with really, really high quality revenue, really good unit economics,” he said. “Everyone should be switching to buy now, pay later.”