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Affirm rebounding today after weaker than expected fourth quarter guidance weighed on the stock. Still, the Buy Now Pay Later company topping fiscal third quarter expectations. Joining me now, Michael Linford, Affirm's COO. Michael, great to speak with you. Obviously, there were highlights in the quarter, 30% 36% year-over-year volume growth, double-digit revenue growth. The guidance was the issue for Wall Street. Talk to me about the biggest factors weighing on guidance going forward.

Thanks for having me. Yeah, we we posted a quarter that I think is just a phenomenal quarter. In our third quarter, as you mentioned, GMV grew 36%, but that was actually the third quarter of accelerating GMV growth. And inside of that, we saw the March volumes accelerating to 40% growth continuing through April. We also saw revenue growth of 36%, consistent with GMV growth. And our unit economic number was up 53% year-on-year while posting a 22% operating margin. These are really impressive numbers for business like ours in this environment. So a lot of a lot of progress that we've made. Our outlook going forward maintains that that optimism for where the business is at and the momentum that we see tempered only by the the realistic fact that you can't accelerate forever. And so the business is at a spot where we feel like it's growing extremely healthy, delivering really strong margins, and the outlook couldn't be better.

So talk to me about the sentiment that you are sussing out from consumers, because obviously as a buy now pay later provider, you have a good sense of how the consumer is spending and how they're reacting to this environment.

Yeah, we feel like we have a very unique and powerful signal into the consumer that really is unmatched out there. And part of that's because of our business model. We, by definition, have to pay really close attention to the data that we see. And and we have a wide distribution where we see lots of categories. And we can we can get a very good picture of where we think the consumer is at. And we think about it in two big areas. The first is demand. Are consumers out spending in the economy? And the second is credit. How are consumers paying back their loans? On the demand side, we again saw three quarters of the third quarter of accelerating growth, 40% growth in the third month last quarter continuing to the first month this quarter. Those are really impressive data points that suggest that consumers highly engaged in the economy. When you think about the credit side, our credit results really do speak for themselves. We had really strong delinquency performance last quarter. Our unit economic number is above our long-term goal of 3 to 4%. And our execution in the ABS capital markets do suggest that we've got a really exciting product for the capital markets, which, you know, really are the best read of the quality of credit of the loan that we're creating. So we feel like we've got really strong demand on the top, really great credit performance, and that's a really good sign for the consumer. I think a lot of the conversation right now is not so much about what is happening, but what might happen into the future. And of course, we don't have any crystal balls, but what we do know is that our business model gives us an incredible advantage in navigating any uncertainty. We give certainty to consumers when they check out, and we give results to merchants. Both of those two things are a huge premium in a market like this.

I I hear you talking about lowered credit delinquencies. Help me pair that with this. In the quarter, you saw a big rise in 0% interest loans. This is a strategy in which merchants can often subsidize borrowing costs to drive more sales. How is that scalable, especially in an environment where merchants are already having to take on the cost of increased tariffs?

That's a great question. I think we talk a lot about the consumer on forums like this, and we spend too little time talking about the merchants. And I really think that the merchants have spent a lot of time have a lot of sympathy for merchants out there. They spent a lot of time dealing with a tremendous amount of volatility in their businesses over the past four years. In particular, the next 12 months I think will be a real test. What's difficult for for us to determine is how much of the volatility is um uh something you can you can predict. Um, I think a lot of merchants right now are taking a conservative posture about where things will go because the real word isn't good or bad, it's uncertain. I think that most merchants are just uncertain about where the future goes.