MAX LEVCHIN DOESN'T have a problem with the concept of borrowing. An immigrant from Soviet Ukraine, he took out loans to attend college in the US. In his early twenties, he persuaded Peter Thiel to fund the company that became PayPal. Since then, access to cash hasn't been much of a problem for him. After PayPal, Levchin tapped the funds of Silicon Valley's finest investors to build Slide, a suite of photo-sharing widgets that sold to Google, and a fertility-tracking app called Glow. But he kept one foot in fintech, and for the past 10 years has been running a company called Affirm, which takes a new approach to consumer lending. Lots of people, Levchin says, need access to credit. But that doesn't mean they should use credit cards.
I met the 47-year-old founder one day late last year at Affirm's headquarters in downtown San Francisco. He was wearing his trademark rimless glasses and a polo shirt with the company's logo. Levchin will talk about credit cards endlessly, and he'll skillfully bring the conversation back, every time, to how-in a country whose collective credit card bill just took its biggest leap in 20 years, to $930 billion-Affirm is the solution.
The company was a pioneer of the "buy now, pay later" model in ecommerce: When an online shopper reaches checkout, they can choose to cover their purchase with a short-term loan from Affirm or one of its competitors. (The big ones include AfterPay, Klarna, and most recently PayPal.) A team of AI underwriters instantly reviews the shopper's financial profile and proposes terms for the loan, which the shopper agrees to pay back in four or more installments. Unlike credit cards, Levchin argues, this system helps discourage people from financially overextending themselves. Affirm makes its money by charging merchants a fee on every transaction and collecting interest from customers with longer-term loans.
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