2/8/2024

speaker
Operator
Conference Operator

Good afternoon. Welcome to the Affirm Holdings, Inc. Second Quarter Fiscal 2024 Earnings Call. Following the speaker's remarks, we will open the lines for your questions. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded, and a replay of the call will be available on our Investor Relations website for a reasonable period of time after the call. I'd now like to turn the call over to Zane Keller, Director, Investor Relations. Thank you. You may begin.

speaker
Zane Keller
Director, Investor Relations

Zane Keller Thank you, operator. Before we begin, I would like to remind everyone listening that today's call may contain forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are subject to numerous risks and uncertainties, including those set forth on our filings with the SEC, which are available on our investor relations website. Actual results may differ materially from any forward-looking statements that we make today. These forward-looking statements speak only as of today, and the company does not assume any obligation or intent to update them, except as required by law. In addition, today's call may include non-GAAP financial measures. These measures should be considered as a supplement to and not a substitute for GAAP financial measures. For historical non-GAAP financial measures, reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP measures can be found in our earnings supplement slide deck, which is available on our investor relations website. Hosting today's call with me are Max Levchin, the firm's founder and chief executive officer, and Michael Linford, the firm's chief financial officer. In line with our practice in prior quarters, we will begin with brief opening remarks from Max before proceeding immediately into questions and answers. On that note, I will turn the call over to Max to begin.

speaker
Max Levchin
Founder and Chief Executive Officer

Thank you, Zane. Thank you all for joining us today. We're excited to share the results of another great quarter. As is our custom, the better the results, the fewer words we use to comment on them. This time around, I feel good enough to go directly to the Q&A. Back to you, Zane.

speaker
Zane Keller
Director, Investor Relations

Thank you, Max. With that, we will now take your questions. Operator, please open the line for our first question.

speaker
Operator
Conference Operator

Thank you. We will now be conducting a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. The confirmation tool will indicate that your line is in the question queue. And you may press star 2 if you'd like to remove your question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star key. Our first question comes from the line of Ramsey Ellisall with Barclays. Please proceed with your question.

speaker
Ramsey Ellisall
Analyst, Barclays

Hi, thanks for taking my question this evening. I was wondering if you could help us think through RLTC for the remaining Q quarters of the year. Sort of what are the drivers, puts, takes, variables that could impact RLTC and, you know, drive underperformance or outperformance? You know, how should we think about those kind of variables?

speaker
Michael Linford
Chief Financial Officer

Yeah, I think obviously if you're thinking in terms of percentage of GMV, there's a number of factors, mix and macro, at the top of the list. If you're thinking about total dollars, then GMV on the platform is going to be the biggest driver of results there. In terms of the RLTC rate, the take rate on a percentage of GMV, It's really mix and macro. So the mix of business across our merchant base and the products that we offer there. And from a macro perspective, everything going on with consumers and rates would be there. We really like the environment we're in right now. That's why we've updated our full year guidance like we have. So we feel good about the back half of the year, our LTC margins. as a percentage of GMV and feel good about that because of the macro environment that we're in. As per the usual, we take the current macro signals, current levels of unemployment, current forward curve, and bake those into our assumptions. But obviously, there's scenarios where those could move one way or the other that would change the outcome for us.

speaker
Ramsey Ellisall
Analyst, Barclays

Okay. And a follow-up from me. On slide 10, where you list out your GMV vertical mix, it looks like general merchandise has picked up quite a bit from travel and ticketing, or travel and ticketing has gone down and general merchandise gone up. Are there any drivers to call out there? And I guess more broadly, can you just comment on performance across key verticals in there?

speaker
Michael Linford
Chief Financial Officer

So travel and ticketing is a very seasonal category. So a lot of folks book summer vacation travel in the first two calendar quarters, last two fiscal quarters. over a year, and it tends to be lowest in terms of bookings in calendar quarters like Q2. And so we think there's a huge seasonality factor there. And for general merchandise, some of our largest merchant enterprise partners fall in that bucket. And as we continue to scale those, we will see lots of purchases there. And it's not unusual for that to be a category that spikes in and around holiday season as a lot of holiday shopping is done in those channels.

speaker
Unknown Participant

Got it. Makes perfect sense. Thank you.

speaker
Operator
Conference Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Andrew Jeffrey with Truist Securities. Please proceed with your question.

speaker
Andrew Jeffrey
Analyst, Truist Securities

Hi, I appreciate you taking the question. Max Brevity is indeed the sister of talent. Make that very clear. So I've got a couple questions just on GMV growth and tender share. As I recall, you've tightened the credit box about a year ago, and obviously the back half of the fiscal year looks strong. Can you comment, either Max or Michael, just on kind of how underwriting and risk are factoring into that strength, and then the corollary, I guess, or the follow-on would be around tender share, your enterprise customers, and it appeared to be elevated during the holidays, and I just wonder if that's a sign of accelerating tender share to come or aspirational tender share growth?

speaker
Max Levchin
Founder and Chief Executive Officer

Appreciate the compliment, first of all. The underwriting settings, so the single most, I would say, accelerated change we've conducted to our, as we call it, box was really more of a year and a half ago than a year ago. April of 22 is when we saw real stress on the consumer and we reacted to that sort of within the next 60 days or so. We've since really not done an enormous amount of significant steering. We change marginal cutoffs on a merchant by merchant, category by category, product by product basis all the time and also change things like allowed terms, as in durations, required down payments, et cetera. So we managed credit very, very actively since the beginning of time for us, but there's not been a major change to our posture in the last year and a half. The numbers that we printed just now are not an accident. We drove them to be what they are very, very deliberately. And I don't want anybody to sort of assume that, you know, we're hands off and the numbers just print themselves. It's a lot of work and we care quite a lot where they end up. We have certain expectations with capital markets and we intend to continue delivering those expectations. And so that's first and foremost. And that governs a lot of our metrics as output to that. The tender share, share wallet as we call it internally, has done really well over the holidays. We've generally been gaining wallet share, although the stories are different category to category, and in some cases merchant to merchant. We feel very good about some of the things that we announced. Obviously, offline we were not a noticeable player until recently, and between the card and some of the offline self-checkout kiosks was really powerful. And then just to call out one particularly strong performance, over the holidays especially and overall in the last quarter, Shopify has just continued to perform extraordinarily. The growth of that particular partnership is accelerating three-plus years into the partnership. That set of products grew about 10%. twice the speed of the rest of a firm. And so it's just been a story of success to success. And we still have a lot of things that we have not scaled out. They have their own offline aspirations that we're obviously very excited to be a part of, et cetera. And so it's a little bit of a, and I'm giving a very long-winded answer here, but frequency for us is being where consumer shops and Sheriff Tender is comes as a consequence of being available and being able to support the various consumer needs as we encounter them.

speaker
Michael Linford
Chief Financial Officer

And the only thing I'd add is we did, with the 36% APR caps that we were able to get in place, we were able to be more expansionary in a number of places. That is completely done now, and so we wouldn't expect any more volume benefit there, although there is still some margin benefit we think that will come as the program continues to roll out and scale. But we wouldn't expect any more volume there because of 36.

speaker
Unknown Participant

Thank you. Appreciate it.

speaker
Operator
Conference Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Reggie Smith with JP Morgan. Please proceed with your question.

speaker
Reggie Smith
Analyst, J.P. Morgan

Hey, good afternoon and congrats on the quarter. You kept your comments short, but I guess where were you most surprised? This was a pretty big beat.

speaker
Unknown Participant

And then add a follow-up after that.

speaker
Max Levchin
Founder and Chief Executive Officer

We try to run a tight ship, so surprises are rarely a welcome thing, even if they are to the good. I already called it out, but I thought Shopify as a company appears to have done a fantastic job with their products and We stand to support our partners there and have done well together.

speaker
Unknown Participant

Let's see. What other surprises? I don't like surprises, Reggie.

speaker
Max Levchin
Founder and Chief Executive Officer

I feel like anytime somebody surprises me, I'm not going to like the outcome. Actually, I'll give you one very surprising fact, which is a little bit of an inside view. But we have very noticeably accelerated our ability to ship software. And I had anticipated some of that, but I'm quite surprised at how productive the teams have been on the engineering side, on the product side, on the design side. It sort of percolates down to revenue. Generally speaking, I expected that we would rally around the goals, especially from sort of the low point of this time last year. If it's a turnaround, it's a much faster and more aggressive turnaround than I myself expected.

speaker
Reggie Smith
Analyst, J.P. Morgan

Got it. And then just looking at the seasonal patterns of your margins, the back half of the year tends to be better than the front half of the year. And when I look at your full year guidance for your operating margin, I guess it implies, and even third quarter, I think it implies a pretty substantial sequential increase in expenses below the RLCC line. Like what... What's driving that and kind of where should we see that show up? Is it a marketing thing? Is it technology? My rough math was almost like $20 million in sequential increase there. I'm not sure if that's right or not. But if you can comment on that a little bit, that would be helpful.

speaker
Michael Linford
Chief Financial Officer

Yeah, we don't provide a specific guidance number for there. So sometimes the way in which we build our guidance can lead to a little bit of – exaggeration on that as you calculate it, but that's right. And there's a couple of factors to think about. Firstly, and this will sound very trivial, but I promise you it does actually end up becoming pretty big. We do expect there to be a lot more payroll tax associated with stock-based compensation in our first quarter, both because people have reset their tax obligations with the new year, but also because the share price is higher. And both those two things will create a little bit of the sequential bump from quarter to quarter. And then we remain really excited about the opportunities that are ahead for us. And so we're continuing to be thoughtful around where we should be adding resources to go build new products and chase the new opportunities. And I think the strength in this quarter's results with respect to our unit economics and operating efficiency give us license to be willing to add a little operating expense, whereas I think we've been very cautious to do that until we could demonstrate it.

speaker
Unknown Participant

Understood. Congratulations. Great quarter. Thank you.

speaker
Operator
Conference Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Dan Doliv with Mizuho. Please proceed with your question.

speaker
Dan Doliv
Analyst, Mizuho

Hey, guys. Great results. Congrats, Max and Mike and the team. Quick question. I have two questions. The first one is on the guide. Obviously, the knee-jerk reaction, which we disagree with, was that the GMV guide is conservative. You know, you quote-unquote beat by $700 million. You're, you know, increasing the guide by a billion for GMV. Like, You sound very upbeat about the macro. Is it just conservatism?

speaker
Michael Linford
Chief Financial Officer

Yeah, I mean, just like we have all year long for the full year, we're only providing a floor for our full year guide. And so we did take our floor up by a billion dollars, which we think is a pretty big step up in what we would expect for the year. We remain very upbeat and excited about the opportunity.

speaker
Dan Doliv
Analyst, Mizuho

Got it. Yeah, no, that's what it seems like. And then maybe one other question on kind of the direct deposit opportunity. You know, you've had tremendous success with the card. Can you maybe talk a little bit about what you're seeing in terms of the usage and frequency for the people that are doing the direct deposit into the card or into the Affirm app?

speaker
Max Levchin
Founder and Chief Executive Officer

It's a little early. We gave the feature a name about 60-something days ago, so it's a little early to brag about the results, but I feel very good about it. It's done in the early versions that it is about as well as we could hope for. We have a lot more things coming for that product. We're working on a couple of very specific things that are just required before you can really call yourself account but feel great it is definitely and I think I mentioned this before but there's kind of three stages of a firm usage if you are a not cardholder not account holder regular user your frequency is four and a half transactions a year and grew again you know 20 plus percent a year on year but if you have a card that goes up quite a lot goes up about 4x and then it grows again again, fairly significantly if you are an account holder. So very excited to give more accounts to people because that's ultimately a frequency driver for us as well.

speaker
Unknown Participant

Got it. Well, sounds like a huge opportunity. Congrats again. Thanks.

speaker
Operator
Conference Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Rob Wildhack with Autonomous Research. Please proceed with your question.

speaker
Rob Wildhack
Analyst, Autonomous Research

Hey, guys. ask a question on volume in a different way. You know, I think the shareholder letter called out three quarters of accelerating volume growth, and then within the December quarter, each month accelerated too. The updated outlook for the rest of the year seems to point to a pretty healthy slowdown in the second half, you know, half over half. So I wanted to get your thoughts on what might be driving that slowdown, if there's anything specific that you're seeing.

speaker
Michael Linford
Chief Financial Officer

So again, I think the full year outlook for us is just a floor. And so we've not given even a range or a ceiling to where we'd expect. So any calculation being done on Q4 is probably not getting to midpoint. And any math you're doing on that number, inclusive of our Q3 range, is probably squeezing that number quite a bit. Separate from that, we had a really good Q2, right? And so the really strong second quarter isn't something that we would ever take and say that's a fundamental change in the business. That's something we would take credit for, be very happy with, but we'd be pretty cautious about how we would build up the outlook for the balance of the year and want to be mindful of all of the factors that can go into that. But there's nothing in our business that would suggest that we're slowing down right now.

speaker
Rob Wildhack
Analyst, Autonomous Research

Okay, thanks. And then your picture and appreciate this may not be in play for this fiscal year, but how would you expect potential interest rate cuts to flow through to funding costs? And then strategically, you know, would you want to drop those savings to the bottom line via higher RLTC margin or do something different?

speaker
Michael Linford
Chief Financial Officer

That's a great question. So whenever we think about a change in rates, we need to understand why the rates are moving. Certainly if the rates are moving in response to other stress in the economy, specifically employment, then it's not a one-for-one benefit. But if you hold all other factors constant, then a decline in rates would help us on the RLTC line. We would seek to continue to run the business in the 3% to 4% range that we've talked about really since we've gone public. And if we were able to be earning at the high end or above that, we would seek to reinvest that in products to engage and reengage, acquire new users and reengage them.

speaker
Unknown Participant

Okay, thanks guys.

speaker
Unknown Participant

Thank you.

speaker
Operator
Conference Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Jason Kupferberg with Bank of America. Please proceed with your question.

speaker
Jason Kupferberg
Analyst, Bank of America

Thank you. So you highlighted in the shareholder letter I think that two-thirds of the revenue growth in the quarter was from interest income. Is it fair to say that's also the revenue line item that surprised you most to the upside relative to your guidance? Just curious how much of the revenue guidance range for the fiscal year is coming from the interest income line. You guys have obviously been doing a really good job on that side of the equation.

speaker
Michael Linford
Chief Financial Officer

Certainly, we're happy to have the unit economics we do have, but I think we're probably more surprised with the healthy merchant fee growth. Whenever merchant fees outpace GMV growth, it creates a pretty good flow through to the full P&L in a way that's outsized. I think some of the strong performance we had above our expectations around RLTC and the flow through for the full P&L was actually driven by the really healthy merchant fee line. Yes, the total aggregate revenue growth wasn't there, but remember against that interest income growth is a pretty steep rise in funding costs. And that's driven by both the balance sheet growth as well as the higher benchmark rates that we're in this year. And in fact, interest funding costs grew faster than interest income. And so while that was important for us to be able to get the business where it is. It's also the case that we don't see that as the real tailwind here. We're still managing through a rate environment that's substantially lower last year than this year. And as those things abate, then we will begin to see the benefit then to the future.

speaker
Jason Kupferberg
Analyst, Bank of America

Okay. No, that makes sense. And then just like a two-part question on GMV, what's your latest expectation for a firm card, GMV, this fiscal year? And then any comments you might have around January GMV trends? I'm kind of curious because we heard from others that card present volumes suffered because of the severe weather. So I'm just wondering if your business benefited at all from that. Thank you.

speaker
Michael Linford
Chief Financial Officer

So we've not given any outlook for the card, and I won't now. What I would say in the letter, we talked briefly about the seasonality of the card. I think this is a really important thing for everybody to pay attention to, which is the card had really strong growth from Q1 to Q2. We would estimate that about half of that growth in card volume was actually underlying seasonality, and the other half was growth in the card, which just means as you think through where the volume should be for the card, the balance of the year, just keep in mind that the Q2 starting point is benefited by a pretty big step up from Q1 to Q2 from seasonality as consumers do spend more in the holiday season. And we're still early enough with the card, fortunately. We're not seeing things like weather impact our card performance.

speaker
Unknown Participant

Thank you.

speaker
Operator
Conference Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Jill Shea with UBS. Please proceed with your question.

speaker
Jill Shea
Analyst, UBS

Good evening. Thanks for taking the question. I was wondering if you could provide us an update on the Shopify partnership and any stats that you could share with us. That would be great. Thanks.

speaker
Max Levchin
Founder and Chief Executive Officer

It's one of the highlights of this last quarter. It's going unbelievably strong. It accelerated for the fourth consecutive quarter. The program is over three years old and the fact that it's still picking up steam is just great and they've been extraordinary partners to us and Nothing but wonderful things to say about Toby and Kaz and Harley and the entire team there. They've just been nothing but excellent in both their execution and the partnership that we had. I think I already dropped that stat, but the program at Shopify grew twice the speed of the overall Affirm growth on the GMV side of things. They have aspirations offline that they're going after quite strongly, and there's a lot of synergies in what we're doing now. There we have a whole host of programs we're contemplating going forward. So lots of wood to chop, feeling very good.

speaker
Unknown Participant

The fact that it's accelerating suggests that there's just more growth to be had for both of us.

speaker
Unknown Participant

Very helpful. Thank you. Thank you.

speaker
Operator
Conference Operator

Our next question comes from the line of James Fawcett with Morgan Stanley. Please proceed with your question.

speaker
James Fawcett
Analyst, Morgan Stanley

Great. Thank you very much this afternoon, guys, for all the time. I wanted to ask on 0% promotions. It seemed like, at least anecdotally, those increased some, particularly towards the end of the December quarter. And I think in your supplements, you showed that 0% long duration merchant rates had picked up. Can you talk a little bit about what's driving that merchant rate tick up? Is it just longer duration generally within that long group? And how should we think about that, both in terms of impact on RLTC margin, but also just in terms of the type of customer that you're bringing in with those promotions? Just wondering if that's enough to move the needle on some of these other metrics.

speaker
Michael Linford
Chief Financial Officer

Yes, that's a good question. As rates have gone up, any of our longer-term 0% programs have needed higher merchant fees and And I really think there's really not much more to it than that. So it's the mix and tied to benchmark rates. In terms of the customers that we bring in, it does skew a little bit higher on the credit spectrum when you do those kind of products. But given the high levels of repeat, it's not really going to change the average as much at Affirm. We, of course, have been very active. We're meeting our merchant partners where we could. in providing anything promotionally in the second quarter, and we've continued to do that. But it didn't change an awful lot from the prior quarter in terms of its total mix, so I don't really think there's a fundamental trend there.

speaker
James Fawcett
Analyst, Morgan Stanley

Got it, got it. And then I wanted to ask, maybe it's a little bit convoluted question, but you're obviously growing the Affirm card really nicely. You know, kind of that run rate that you talked about seems to be around 100,000 cards a quarter, or I'm sorry, a month. How should we think about it? A, I'm wondering how we should think about the availability or the credit pool available and how that's growing by comparison, right? Because as you send out cards, people will use it. You said most of that is interest-bearing, so some of that available credit gets absorbed, but then there's new credit growth in that pool as you add more cards. So just how should we think about that potential growth to buy pool growing vis-a-vis the growth in cards? Hopefully that question makes sense.

speaker
Max Levchin
Founder and Chief Executive Officer

I'm going to try to answer, but feel free to tell me that I'm answering the wrong questions. I think you're asking, I guess the way I'm interpreting this, or at least try to answer, is does the card availability to consumers create new pools available transactions for us to take on? And the answer is yes. Yeah, that's a good point. Our offline usage with the card versus without the card is drastically different. And so all of those transactions are entirely incremental. It's not really all that magical why transactions of the cardholders are significantly higher than average transactions for non-cardholder from user. It's because these people are, first of all, they're more committed because they requested a card. And two, they're bringing it to source. So it just touches a larger... open field of opportunity. In terms of underwriting and our exposure on the credit side, et cetera, there's no change in the sense that we, and we talked about this before, but for the longest time, our calling card in the underwriting world was this thing called ITAX, which is the Internal Transactional Affirmed Credit Score. And that allowed us to do really precise underwriting at the transactional level. Some number of quarters ago, we have augmented that with a user credit score, which allows us to underwrite both a more holistic consumer in addition to every individual transaction. We still underwrite every transaction. We still reserve the right to say, we cannot lend money to you. But we have a score that we feel very good about in our ability to say, what's the overall capacity to borrow and pay us back and willingness to do so. And we lend on the card and off the card using the same set of scores and the same set of variables and limits. And so you can borrow from a firm using an integrated point of sale solution. You can borrow on the card with two different modalities of borrowing on the card. But all of it goes against the same set of variables and same set of observed behaviors that governs our ability to approve the next transaction. The thing that's great about the card is that it's optimized for convenience and everything like multi-lane checkout environments all the way to online shopping. So it's an expansion of opportunity but not an expansion of our willingness to take on more risk. I think that answers it, but I'm happy to provide lots more details if you feel like.

speaker
Michael Linford
Chief Financial Officer

I think the other thing to say is I don't think we're anywhere near the limits on what we think. We would think about exposure limits for these users, and we're nowhere near some sort of cap there for the population. We think there's a lot of frequency that we can drive with the existing users.

speaker
Unknown Participant

Great, great. Appreciate that, Max. Thanks, Michael.

speaker
Operator
Conference Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of John Hecht with Jefferies. Please proceed with your question.

speaker
John Hecht
Analyst, Jefferies

Afternoon, guys. Thanks for taking my question. Like just thinking about kind of the appetite for selling versus retaining, you know, the loans that you guys generate this year. I mean, you have interest rate, at least the curve is going down. It looks like sale execution is getting better. You guys had an ABS transaction, I think, yesterday, and the execution there was good. So how do we just think about kind of balance sheet movement versus marketplace movement over the course of the year?

speaker
Michael Linford
Chief Financial Officer

Yeah, thanks for the question. So we did price an ABS deal, and we did so at an all-in cost of capital, 100 basis points lower than a deal we did in December. So in a very short period of time, you're seeing the market really give us credit for that. And that, we think, is a really healthy sign for the capital system and ecosystem overall. And we think as a reflection of both an improved macro outlook for everybody, but for us more specifically, the disciplined approach to credit that we've taken over the past year is getting valued, we think, in the debt capital markets. And so we feel very strong about that. When we do the revolving ABS deals like the one we just did, our 24A deal, those do end up on the balance sheet. And so while we do think about that as... And a really important funding channel, it isn't off-balance sheet. Our off-balance sheet strategies involve mostly selling whole loans, although we do some non-revolving, some term securizations. With respect to the whole loan sales, we feel really excited about both the existing partners expanding and the pipeline of new opportunities that we have. Those conversations have gone very well. I think very consistent with the reaction that the ABS market has had there's real value being given to us for the kind of credit outcomes that we've driven and Frankly the yield that we put into the asset has allowed us to continue to be able to sell at at prices that are really good for us as is always the case and we've said since day one that We don't have one strategy that's better than the other. The things that we do are, first and foremost, enable the growth in the business, and I'm extremely proud of the way the team has been able to support the capital program over the past year through all the volatility, enabling all the growth that we've delivered. The second priority is to deliver our unit economics. Clearly, if we're running in the 3% to 4% range like we did this past quarter, we feel very strong about that. And then we begin to want to manage the capital efficiency of the program. That's the third piece. And obviously, whole loan sales are more efficient, but it's the third of the three priorities. And so we wouldn't really want to overuse that lever. And then the last comment is each of our capital strategies really exist and reinforce one another. And so you really won't see us pivot to one or the other. We're going to continue to scale all of our channels. That means continued ABS execution, continued forward flow, and continued use of our warehouse lines.

speaker
John Hecht
Analyst, Jefferies

Okay. My other question was asked and answered, and I appreciate the color. Thanks very much.

speaker
Operator
Conference Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Kevin Barker with Piper Sandler. Please proceed with your question.

speaker
Kevin Barker
Analyst, Piper Sandler

Thanks for taking my questions. So there was a little bit of a tick up in the net charge off rate in the quarter. It seems like you built reserves last quarter that may have preempted the charge off coming through or could be partially seasonality as well. Is there anything to point out there? And would you expect that charge off rate to drift lower just given you're seeing a larger portion of GMV being driven by a firm card? Thanks.

speaker
Michael Linford
Chief Financial Officer

No, I don't think the card is going to drive different credit outcomes for the whole portfolio. I think the level of repeat usage might where you do see better credit outcomes on repeat users overall, but I don't think the card is big enough really to affect the total portfolio numbers yet. Obviously, when it gets much larger, it will begin to have a more material impact, but for now, I think it's small enough. And yeah, there's really nothing to point to specifically on the charge-offs. Again, to think about our charge-off policy, we charge off at 120 days. Delinquencies, once they get to past 60 or 90 days, are overwhelmingly likely to go towards charge-offs. We have a pretty good sense of that and full allowance at all times to handle the future charge-offs that we estimate.

speaker
Kevin Barker
Analyst, Piper Sandler

I think you mentioned that you were leaning in a little bit last quarter. Are you... you know, opening up the credit box to attract more users, it seems like it's an opportune time to do that, just given your acceleration here and profitability that's being generated.

speaker
Michael Linford
Chief Financial Officer

Yeah, I think the strong units give us permission to do that more than anything. So we talk about 3% to 4% in the revenue-less transaction cost as a percentage of GMV. That's the real constraint for us. And so if we're in that range, we can continue to be very aggressive about acquiring and reengaging new users. And that's really the constraint much more so than anything else.

speaker
Unknown Participant

Thank you.

speaker
Operator
Conference Operator

Thank you. As a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. Our next question comes from the line of Michael Eng with Goldman Sachs. Please proceed with your question.

speaker
Michael Eng
Analyst, Goldman Sachs

Hey, good afternoon. Thanks for the question. I just have two. First, a housekeeping question. Could you just help explain the uptick in the merchant fee rates for the long core zeros? And are there any initiatives or mixed dynamics that may affect that going forward? And then second, just a bigger picture question, transactions per active have obviously been growing 4.4 this past quarter. You're also seeing really strong repeat customers. What does that tell you about the loyalty or engagement of customers and the durability about the install base of users? Are these customers using this because it's become more habitual and it's a better experience, or is it out of a necessity of credit? Thank you.

speaker
Michael Linford
Chief Financial Officer

So on the first question, it really is just a function of the mix in our business. And that's always been true for merchant fee rates. We always talk about merchant fee rates as being mixed-driven. That's why we began breaking it out in the supplement. The slight pickup you see on one of the categories is really just a function of mix within that category, but also as duration goes up, so does the price, especially in this rate environment where it's pretty duration-sensitive. in terms of the price that you charge. Again, I don't think there's a broader trend to be read into there. And on the frequency question, I'll let Max answer that.

speaker
Max Levchin
Founder and Chief Executive Officer

I think it's a reflection of the fact that the product is becoming more widely available more than anything. I think as we sign up some of the partnerships and expand them, like the Shopify reference I made earlier, it does result in wider availability. The product is... popular. It's well liked by the users. One of our top questions in customer service is why isn't brand X supporting a firm right now? And we work very hard to make sure there are fewer and fewer of those. And so as we become more available, also as we become available offline in the form of the card as well as some of the integrations that we've done, you'll naturally see more transactional velocity and frequency increase. The product is a better product, in my highly biased opinion, than that of a credit card. And as credit utilization goes up broadly, I think we are the unfair beneficiaries of that usage. Given a chance or choice, consumers opt in for more affirmed spend than credit card spend. And they're rewarded by having no late fees, no compounding interest, all the good things it would bring.

speaker
Unknown Participant

Thanks, Max. Thanks, Michael.

speaker
Operator
Conference Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Andrew Bowe with Wells Fargo. Please proceed with your question.

speaker
Andrew Bowe
Analyst, Wells Fargo

Hey, thanks for taking the question. And excuse me, this has already been asked, but I just want to get an update on what you've seen with Affirm Card usage and anything that's surprised you, you know, another three months into its evolution. around behaviors or categories, just anything broadly around that would be great.

speaker
Max Levchin
Founder and Chief Executive Officer

It's going really well. You can see in the supplement that we are continuing to grow it. From my point of view, for what it's worth, we're growing it cautiously for a couple of good reasons. One, it's a new mode of operation, which means that the downstream services such as customer service, dispute resolution, merchant disputes, etc., also has to scale. So we're going to grow deliberately for a little while longer before we feel that we've learned all the important muscle memories of how to handle various conflicts that inevitably occur in commerce, et cetera. And so I feel very good about the growth. We still will have many, many more turns on potentially increasing that. In terms of surprises, I think it's all generally gone to plan. There is plenty more to do on reasons to use the card more often. We talked about at the investor event last year, we're dangerously close to actually making good on it. We have reward programs in mind that give people reasons to use the card for all transactions, not just considered purchases. There's plenty to do with tighter integration between a firm card and a firm account, which we've done a couple of things with, but there's still more features to come. From my point of view, the card is still very, very early. There's just a long roadmap of things to do there, both on the frequency of use basis as well as modalities, making sure that consumers really understand the full power that it brings. And then once we feel that that's really all figured out, we have a lot more growth to enable there when we see that it's the right time to do it.

speaker
Andrew Bowe
Analyst, Wells Fargo

Is that next leg of growth just a function of, you know, then you finally get the green light to, you know, put the extra leg of sales and marketing dollars into the card, into really the solution in order to kind of find that next leg of growth? Or is it just... moving, you know, further into that.

speaker
Max Levchin
Founder and Chief Executive Officer

Today, it's really there's I don't anticipate any marketing dollars allocated towards distributing the card in any foreseeable future. It's not any budget that that is not how it's gonna get grown. So today to get the card, you have to have been an Affirmed Transactor before, you have to be in good standing, you have to be fairly far down the Affirmed journey, and then you have to react to one of the now fairly visible sort of adverts when we say, hey, do you want to use the Affirm card? We really think you should try it. You're eligible. So we've marketed it without too much restraint, although it's still being kept to a higher credit quality standard than the overall Affirm. So we're still tilting the scale a little bit in our favor in terms of consumers that get the card offers are not quite at the same level of cutoff as everybody else. And so that's one obvious way of opening up the funnel, but you can imagine a much more aggressive approach where, for example, right now you have a choice between taking out a loan on a one-time virtual card number or you can go down the rabbit hole of applying for a card. Obviously, taking away the former will naturally increase the latter. So there are several non-dramatic but meaningful levers of growth that we have chosen not to pull on just yet. And then ultimately, if you sign up for a firm, at some point, you're just going to get a card. And that's certainly not a thing we're going to do tomorrow, but that is a meaningful trajectory changer.

speaker
Andrew Bowe
Analyst, Wells Fargo

So it still sounds like it's going to be pretty targeted for a while here. Great. Thank you.

speaker
Max Levchin
Founder and Chief Executive Officer

Not forecasting any time that that stops or goes, but I feel very good about the card growth for now.

speaker
Operator
Conference Operator

Thank you. There are no further questions at this time, and I would like to turn the floor back over to Zane Keller for closing comments.

speaker
Zane Keller
Director, Investor Relations

Well, thank you, everybody, for joining the call today. We look forward to speaking with you again next quarter.

speaker
Operator
Conference Operator

This concludes today's teleconference. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.

Disclaimer

This conference call transcript was computer generated and almost certianly contains errors. This transcript is provided for information purposes only.EarningsCall, LLC makes no representation about the accuracy of the aforementioned transcript, and you are cautioned not to place undue reliance on the information provided by the transcript.

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