5/7/2026

speaker
Max Levchin
Co-founder & CEO, Affirm

I think, speaking of maybe the most important and least understood advantage that we have, we have been at it for a very long time. We have built some very, very sophisticated underwriting capabilities. We'll definitely talk a lot about that next week, so I'm going to bite my tongue right there. But we have some very, very cool stuff that we've done, not just recently, but over the years in underwriting. great percentage, maybe the totality of our competitors that have raised their hand and said, sure, underwriting is not that hard. We can do it. One by one found out that it is. It is actually very, very difficult. And by showing a result, we may have fooled the world by, you know, just print a good result quarter after quarter after quarter. And we get yelled at, you know, gosh, why don't you guys already admit that it's always going to be over 4%. It is a difficult balance to strike to print these unit economics day in and day out. And All of that or a lot of that comes from our AI team and the research that they do, and it's hard work. So I think we make it very easy to believe that just isn't that hard, and it really is. And the longer the show goes, the more it becomes obvious that we are pretty good at math and are very serious about it, and the rest of the competitors are not.

speaker
Michael Linford
Chief Financial Officer, Affirm

And then, Darren, just to your question on the growth rate, Obviously, we're really happy with the growth rate that we posted in Q3. And we're incrementally more positive on the Q4 growth rate in the updated guide. I will just remind everyone that we did sunset a top three merchant in Q1 of this year. So we are comping against, you know, there is a difficult comp in the prior year period. And that comp did step up a little bit from Q3 to Q4. So it's a little bit more of a headwind to growth We're talking sort of a few points of growth in terms of headwind. And as we get into fiscal 27, you know, the comps get a lot easier for us. It's more of a same-store comp for us. So we don't think that the Q4 growth rate will necessarily be a ceiling as we look ahead into fiscal 27. Okay.

speaker
Moderator
Webcast Moderator

Very helpful, guys. Thank you.

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