Affirm beat Wall Street's profit estimate by 109% and raised its full-year outlook, even as the stock market worries that stablecoins are coming for the card networks it competes against.

Max Levchin's company just had the kind of quarter that makes a skeptic rethink buy now, pay later. Affirm reported fiscal first-quarter earnings on November 6, posting adjusted earnings per share of 23 cents against a Zacks consensus of just 11 cents, a beat of more than 100%. Revenue climbed 34% year over year to $933 million, ahead of the $882 million analysts expected, and shares jumped more than 11% in the next session, according to Zacks and Yahoo Finance.

Gross merchandise volume, the total dollar amount of purchases run through Affirm's installment loans, rose 42% to $10.8 billion. That is the number that matters most to a lender like Affirm, since it is the pipeline that eventually turns into revenue and loan performance. Affirm raised its full-year GMV guidance to more than $47.5 billion, up from the prior floor of $46 billion, and lifted its adjusted operating margin target to above 27.1%, according to Yahoo Finance.

The Affirm Card did even more of the heavy lifting. Card GMV grew 135% year over year, and the card added 500,000 new cardholders in the quarter to reach 2.8 million, generating $1.4 billion in transaction volume on its own. Active consumers overall grew 24% to 24.1 million, the seventh straight quarter that growth has accelerated rather than slowed. For a lender, that acceleration is the tell: it means more people are coming back to use Affirm again, not just trying it once.

Much of the enthusiasm traces to a single relationship. Levchin confirmed that Affirm extended its partnership with Amazon for another five years, through January 2031, effective February 1, 2026. The deal keeps Affirm's installment loans available to Amazon shoppers at checkout and through Amazon Pay on certain third-party retail sites, according to Yahoo Finance and 247wallst.com. Losing that distribution would have gutted Affirm's growth story overnight. Keeping it, on terms that stretch out five more years, removed the single biggest overhang hanging over the stock heading into earnings.

Affirm signed an exclusive, multi-year pay-over-time deal with Sam's Club on October 22, nearly two years after losing the main Walmart contract to Klarna in March 2025. Shares barely budged, closing down 1.51% at $72.40. - affirm wins exclusive sam's club installment payment deal - klarna loses walmart market share to affirm competitor

Frankly, the timing could not have landed better for Affirm's narrative. Visa and Mastercard shares have fallen sharply this year, dropping as much as 19% to 23% on fears that stablecoins will eventually bypass card rails altogether, according to StreetInsider and Nasdaq. Stablecoin transaction volume hit $33 trillion in 2025, up 72% from the year before, and both networks have scrambled to respond: Mastercard agreed to buy stablecoin infrastructure firm BVNK for up to $1.8 billion, the largest stablecoin acquisition on record, while Visa says its own stablecoin-linked card volumes nearly tripled last quarter across more than 160 programs globally.

Affirm doesn't have to solve any of that. Affirm doesn't run a card network; it underwrites loans and takes a cut from merchants and consumers for spreading out payments. But the contrast is hard to miss. While two of the most entrenched franchises in American finance spend billions defending their rails from a technology that barely existed in its current form five years ago, a fifteen-year-old fintech that plenty of analysts once wrote off as a pandemic fad just posted its strongest quarter since going public in 2021.

That doesn't mean Affirm is immune to its own risks. It is still, at its core, a consumer lender, and consumer lenders live and die by credit quality when the economy turns. A 42% jump in GMV is only good news if the loans behind it get paid back. Affirm's own guidance increase suggests its underwriting models are holding up fine for now, and the market, up more than 11% on the news, is taking that bet at face value.

Levchin has spent years trying to convince Wall Street that Affirm's model, point-of-sale installment loans with transparent terms and no late fees, is a durable alternative to revolving credit card debt, not just a recession-era gimmick. Seven consecutive quarters of accelerating active consumer growth is the kind of evidence that argument needed.

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