The Public Ledger: Affirm Takes a Swing

Hello, Fintech Friends!

You rarely hear fintechs attacking banks lately. Those times are long gone, as many fintech ambitions to disrupt the incumbents didn't materialize. Affirm is the exception. At its Investor Forum this month, Chief Product Officer Vishal Kapoor went after credit card issuers, who are still mostly banks. He called them "the late fees industrial complex" and said Affirm wants to "take a sledgehammer" to it. Unlike most fintechs that talked like this, the numbers actually back him up. The Affirm Card is the proof.

4.4 million active cardholders are spending $2,400 annually on the card, and the Card is growing 130% year over year. 16% of cardholders are Gen Z, choosing an Affirm Card over a traditional credit card. Kapoor said the Card is Affirm's "highest growing and most profitable product."

The longer-term ambition is bigger. Affirm laid out a path to 20 million cardholders each spending $7,500 a year on the card, which gets to $150 billion in annual cardholder spend. The growth doesn't have to come from paid acquisition. Affirm has already underwritten 71 million Americans, more than half of whom have transacted with Affirm, but don't yet have a Card. Affirm already knows these customers, and they just need to convert them.

For context, American Express' US consumer segment did $707.5 billion in spend across 47.3 million cards in 2025, or $14,960 per cardholder. The combined Capital One and Discover US card business does $812 billion across more than 100 million cards, or roughly $8,000 per cardholder. Affirm's $7,500-per-cardholder target lands almost exactly at Capital One's current per-card spend, yet still below Amex's.

The Affirm Card is structurally different from a traditional credit card. Real-time underwriting on every swipe means purchasing power tracks the customer's actual cash flow rather than sitting at a static limit. Customers pick pay-now, pay-later, or decide-later on each transaction.

Traditional credit card economics depend on late fees and interest from revolvers, and Affirm has neither. "We will not have revolving lines of credit," said CFO Rob O'Hare at the forum. "It's all closed-ended loans," added CTO Libor Michalek. That keeps Affirm out of the two biggest revenue sources for traditional issuers. The business monetizes by being a better product, which is a harder lever than fees but also more durable.

A loyalty program launches in the next few weeks. Cardholders get daily exclusive offers instead of annual rewards charts, with longer 0% terms or customized financing on specific merchants every day.

Fintechs have been trying to crack credit cards for decades. Only one ever did. Capital One, in 1988. Can Affirm be next? It started as a checkout button. Now it wants to be in your wallet for everything you buy. If the path to 20 million cardholders holds, the Card becomes Affirm's main business, and Affirm becomes a top-tier US credit issuer alongside Amex and Capital One.

Mark late fees zero, Max!

Jev Kazanins

p.s. Have feedback? Reach out on X

Chime $CHYM ( ▼ 0.45% ) CEO, Chris Britt, said at the J.P. Morgan Global TMC Conference last week that pursuing a national bank charter is "a when, not if" for the company. Chime's 10.2 million active members are "not the unbanked," he said, and they come from incumbents like JPMorgan, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo as they feel "fee-ed to death." Chime competes mainly with the big banks for primary account and direct deposit relationships. Chime reported Q1 2026 results on May 7 with 19% YoY active member growth and its first quarter of positive GAAP net income at $53 million.

Cash App is already lending to consumers directly via Block's industrial loan company. Affirm filed for its own Nevada ILC in January. Revolut applied for a US national bank charter in March. Nubank got conditional OCC approval in January and is preparing a US launch. Every fintech becomes a bank eventually, as I wrote in March, because a charter unlocks deposit funding and origination control. Chime is the only one on this list still relying on a partner bank. Can it afford to wait much longer?

Read more: Pursuing bank charter is ‘a when, not if’

Block’s $XYZ ( ▲ 3.04% ) Jack Dorsey teased two hardware product launches at the same conference. One is a new Square product that Dorsey said would change "how a seller thinks about operating their business." Square has been shipping point-of-sale hardware since the first card reader in 2010. The other is… something for Cash App, which Dorsey would only describe as "hardware related" and something users "always see." Cash App has been a software product since 2013, with the Cash Card as its only physical artifact. Don’t know about you, but I’m super curious to find out what it is.

Dorsey also called hardware "a superpower" because Block controls the whole stack, with vendor relationships built through years of hiring ex-Apple engineers. He tied the argument to AI. As pure software becomes "more and more throw away," he said, a physical product "feels real" and "inspires trust" in ways a screen cannot. Any pure-software fintech competitor would need to build both layers to match Block's consumer reach. Block has been a lot of fun to watch lately!

Listen to the conversation: Block Inc at 2026 J.P. Morgan Global Technology, Media and Communications Conference

Qivalis, the European bank consortium developing a euro stablecoin, added 25 banks last week, bringing the total to 37 across 15 countries. New members include ABN Amro, Intesa Sanpaolo, and Rabobank, joining earlier participants BNP Paribas, ING, and UniCredit. Circle $CRCL ( ▲ 0.05% ) dominates the euro stablecoin market with EURC at $450 million market cap, more than half of the $895 million total. A successful Qivalis gives Europe its own euro stablecoin.

ECB President Christine Lagarde warned that dollar stablecoins in Europe pose "a legitimate concern that risks entrenching dollar dependency." But in the same speech, she rejected private euro stablecoins as the fix. Lagarde wants public infrastructure anchored in central bank money, with the ECB's digital euro slated for 2029. European banks don't want to wait for the digital euro, and don't want to leave the market to Circle. Qivalis has applied to the Dutch central bank for a license and plans to launch in the second half of 2026.

Read more: Euro stablecoin project gains backing of 37 banks