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Affirm’s Amazon-sized ambitions

Hello and welcome to Protocol | Fintech! This Tuesday: Affirm's Amazon deal, Gensler looks at payment for order flow, and PayPal wants to add investing.
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Affirm's Amazon deal could be a major boost for the "buy now, pay later" provider.
The agreement will make Affirm deals available to Amazon's customers at checkout, enabling them to split any purchases worth $50 or more into monthly payments. The deal, struck last week, was the latest big move in the industry.
This is all about repeat customers. Amazon's giant reach will boost new customers to Affirm, while also providing more incentive for Amazon customers to click "buy" on more items.
Repeat customers translates into becoming a household name. Through its partnerships with household-name retailers — and especially with Amazon — Affirm basically wants to connect directly with customers.
But big partnerships aren't without risk. Should Affirm continue to gain traction with consumers, Amazon and Shopify are bound to notice.
Over the last two years, many retailers have seen the benefit of investing in new, flexible payments. Despite the low-hanging fruit this opportunity presents, our research shows 60% of ecommerce merchants globally do not feel they receive enough payment insight to allow them to innovate their models. So how can businesses turn their ships around before it's too late?
Can a non-bank deliver crypto yields without crypto headaches? Eco aims to replace banks, checking, savings and credit cards, allowing customers to work in dollars — but with USDC stablecoins at the backend.
Payroll data is fintech's $10 billion "holy grail," and access to it is expected to unleash a new wave of fintech innovation. Fintech companies, including Plaid, Finicity and newer startups, are jockeying for position.
(Albert is a financial management app.)
What fintech trend are you most excited about?
For the last 15 years, a lot of the products that fintech consumers use haven't changed dramatically until the last decade. People have bank accounts, savings accounts, investment accounts. Over the last 10 to 15 years, you've seen huge changes in the way people are able to do things, the way payments are made, the way people are able to save, the way they're able to invest, the way they're able to manage cash. That has really given a whole new level of control and expectation of how good these interfaces and products should be. It's no longer acceptable to just deliver a website that maybe sort of works or has downtime every Saturday night like some of the old financial service products used to. Customers are going to expect these amazing services, amazing experiences. That's the biggest trend in all of this.
What fintech trend is most troubling for you?
The way people are investing. Obviously investing is the cornerstone of wealth-creation long term. The way people allocate their personal portfolios, I don't think should be in high-volatility stocks or exclusively cryptocurrency. I think it's most troubling to see that the amazing access, amazing interfaces people have been given to invest in are not being coupled with a more responsible set of guidelines as well. At the end of the day, you will not consistently, with any good expected value, build wealth by day-trading or being in meme stocks. Part of building amazing interfaces and giving everybody access is you also have to help people do things that yield out good outcomes consistently. I'm not sure that's happening entirely.
What was your biggest professional blunder, and what did you learn from it?
The thing that we realized, after a year of building an app for consumers that helps them budget and save more, is that people really wanted to talk to humans. And customers were willing to pay to talk to humans. About a year in, we offered Albert Genius, and we let customers pay what they think is fair for Albert Genius. That's ultimately what let us take off. That's what let us actually get to where we are and build a service that people want. Customers are willing to pay for a service that we're offering them and that's a very fantastic business model because it's aligned with the customer. So the biggest blunder is not doing that from day zero, but thankfully we learned it along the way.
Thanks for reading — see you Friday!
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