‘American consumers are still alive and well’ – CEO insists market turmoil does not affect business activities

Affirm Holdings President and CEO Max Levchin told CNBC that despite the underperforming market this year, American consumers — and Affirm customers — are spending healthily.

“American consumers are still alive and well. They’re shopping, they’re shopping, they’re paying off their loans, at least to affirm pretty well. All in all, things are going according to plan, the turn of events is good. the stock market action doesn’t seem to have a real impact on our underlying business which is doing really well,” Levchin said in an interview Thursday night on “Crazy Money.”

Confirmed stakes more than 20% increase at around $22.50 on Friday, a day after the buy now, pay later lender’s latest quarterly earnings report, showed a smaller-than-expected loss. Affirm also beat top estimates and said it is expanding its partnership with Shopify.

“If you want, we’ve been the partner of your choice, with all these really, really great companies driving American e-commerce, and we’ve done a great job there. That’s where all of our growth comes from. There’s a great growing program… a self-service merchant,” said Levchin, noting that Affirm also has a partnership with Walmart and Amazon.

Affirm opens Friday near $25 per share. But the figure is still down 85% from its all-time high of $176.65 in November.

Affirm has yet to give a full outlook for fiscal 2023 or guidance for the full year. It plans to provide those numbers in the company’s next earnings report.

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

“Some of our competitors just posted 15% year-on-year growth, some don’t go public so I don’t really know. You can see from my numbers that we’re doing it. very good and really high quality turnover, really good unit economics,” he said. “People should switch to buy now, pay later.”