Money 2020 USA 2025 Flashes -BUILDING THE NEW FINANCIAL STACK: HOW FLEXIBILITY IS REDEFINING CONSUMER PAYMENTS

As fintech innovation collides with traditional finance, a new consumer financial stack is emerging-one centered on flexibility, access, and choice. Join leaders from Affirm, Visa, and FIS as they discuss how emerging trends like Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL), flexible card credentials, and embedded finance are redefining the payments landscape. Learn why major banks, card networks, and fintechs are swiftly integrating these flexible payment models, and what this shift means for traditional products like credit and debit cards. For legacy and upstart financial institutions alike, the future belongs to those who are able to meet consumer demand for payment choice and flexibility. Key insights attendees will gain: - Why payment flexibility will define consumer finance in 2025 - How innovative payment features like installment plans and dynamic card credentials are becoming standard elements of everyday financial experiences - What new partnership models mean for consumer choice and financial access.

We are not a lender, and we are still a consumer-first product. What’s changed, I think, is how people want to make payments and how they want to pay for things. Before, it was just on websites through, like you said, a pop-up or a digital checkout. But since then, we’ve realized people want to use digital wallets, like Apple Pay, Google Pay. So we have partnerships with them, and we now use Affirm directly in those wallets.

People also want to use physical cards. There’s a lot of times people want to use their card to pay for things, especially in-store. 80% of payments still happen in-store, and cards are frankly the easiest form factor for that still.

One of the things that we’ve started doing more recently is figuring out other ways we can bring Affirm, not just to our cardholders or people that are working on merchants that we have partnerships with, but other debit cards. And that’s where our partnership with FIS and Visa has come in, where we said, “Let’s take the power of Affirm — so paying for things before, in installments, or after a purchase — and add that to existing debit cards.”

So consumers don’t have to go and get an Affirm card anymore. They can use their existing debit card, and thus we partnered with the folks at FIS and Visa to bring that to life.

Moderator:

And Justin, you’re the distribution layer connecting this new functionality to over 2,500 banks, many of them regional. And this kind of partnership gives them a way to stay competitive without building the tech themselves. What kind of demand are you seeing from those banks, and how are they pitching these flexible payments to their customers?

Justin:

We’re seeing a demand from the large banks we talked to to the very, very small. And I think I like to really focus on sort of the mid-market down. Those are the ones that really struggle with capital investment, you know, the path to market for a great concept, a great product like this.

And that’s where I think we can bring the most opportunity to the market. By building into our platform, it becomes a very easy path for them to market, and ultimately helps them meet the demand that they’re hearing from their consumers.

Those cardholders, whether they’re younger or older, want additional utility of their debit dollar. And they want a credit instrument, but they don’t necessarily want credit by itself. So how can we bring that credit instrument into the debit space?

And that’s really our role at FIS, is to bring the great technology of Affirm, add it to our debit processing platforms, and make an easy path to market for all the banks that we process for.