Affirm’s card spending more than doubled. Buy now, pay later is leaving the checkout button.

Affirm Card spending rose 117% to $3.3 billion in the quarter ended September 30. Active cardholders more than doubled, to 6.0 million. Affirm, the San Francisco buy-now-pay-later company founded by PayPal co-founder Max Levchin, said the card alone moved more purchase volume than the whole firm did in the same quarter five years ago. In the November 5 shareholder letter, that was the number Levchin wanted investors to sit with.

The company made its name as a button at online checkout. The Affirm Card is a Visa debit card, issued with bank partners, that follows the shopper after that button. You can pay in full from a linked account, or open the Affirm app and request a pay-over-time plan for an eligible purchase. Levchin told analysts about 30% of card transactions already happen in stores. Most people still set the plan before they tap. Some split an eligible debit buy afterward. The household version of that shift is simple. Affirm used to show up next to Klarna when you bought a mattress. Now it can show up at the grocery aisle and the gas pump.

Affirm gets paid for that habit in a few different ways. When it sits inside a merchant’s checkout, the retailer usually pays a fee. When someone uses the Affirm Card, merchants pay interchange on the Visa rails and Affirm takes a cut through its issuing-bank partners. When the shopper chooses an interest-bearing plan, Affirm also earns interest on the loan, or sells the loan and keeps a servicing fee. In this quarter, total revenue rose 35% to $1.26 billion. Interest income rose 45%, to about $658 million. Network revenue, the merchant-fee and interchange bucket, rose only 23%. Card volume was diluting the richer checkout fees and replacing them with interchange plus interest.

Chief financial officer Rob O’Hare said Affirm Card loans have historically run more than 80% interest-bearing. That is the quiet engine under the flashy volume line. Across the whole platform, interest-bearing loans were about 72% of Affirm’s $14.4 billion in gross merchandise volume, the dollar value of purchases Affirm finances, which rose 34%. The card itself was 23% of that total. Direct-to-consumer volume, almost all of it the card, rose 55% to $5.1 billion. Leave the merchant’s page, and Affirm often takes a thinner fee up front and a thicker slice of what the borrower pays each month.

You can hear the everyday shift in the ticket size. Transactions rose 34% to 56 million while the average order slipped 1% to $258. Affirm said it lowered purchase minimums on purpose, to catch smaller carts. Active consumers rose 19% to 28.7 million. Over the trailing year, each active consumer made 7.3 Affirm transactions, also up 19%. About 21% of those consumers now hold the card, nine points higher than a year earlier. Financing is showing up more often, on more ordinary purchases.

None of that tells you whether the people behind those swipes are keeping up. Affirm’s 30-day-plus delinquencies, excluding Peloton and short Pay-in-X loans, rose to 2.9% in September, up 35 basis points from June and nine from a year earlier. The provision for credit losses jumped to $259 million from $163 million. O’Hare tied part of that jump to a September underwriting experiment Affirm kept on its own books. Levchin pointed to seasonality and to short loan terms that limit how long a bad call sits. Investors still sold the stock hard that day. Record card volume and later payments can print in the same quarter.

Affirm’s pitch to shoppers is transparency: no late fees, no hidden fees, and a payment schedule you see before you commit. The interest line is still real. Consumer disclosures put pay-over-time rates between 0% and 36% APR depending on credit and product, with Pay in 4 at 0%. A grocery swipe that becomes a monthly plan sits on the same calendar as rent, a remittance, and a credit-card minimum. The company’s growth chart does not pay those for you.

Affirm wants the loan even closer to the wallet. Affirm Edge, still in development, would put its installment tools inside banks’ and credit unions’ debit apps, with first pilots aimed for the first half of 2027. President Michael Linford said bank partners move slowly, so the rollout will take time. In the meantime the merchant list keeps widening: AliExpress, Sam’s Club, J. Crew and Madewell, Farfetch, Sur La Table, and a SeatGeek renewal that adds Canada. Checkout is still where most people meet Affirm. The card is how the loan tags along afterward.

If Affirm is in your phone, or AFRM is in a brokerage account, read the volume and the payment calendar as two files. Debt Payoff Priority Benchmarks with Family Support Obligations and Credit and Family Money Myths for Immigrant Households help order what you already owe. Keep the standing wire and a cash buffer visible in the Family Support Budget Calculator and Emergency Fund Benchmarks When Family Depends on You before a new installment quietly claims the remittance month.

Count the payments that follow each swipe. That is the household version of Affirm’s card story.